- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review D

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Letter
  • Open Access

Remarks on the QCD-electroweak phase transition in a supercooled universe

Dietrich Bödeker*

  • Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany

  • *bodeker@physik.uni-bielefeld.de
PDF

Phys. Rev. D 104, L111501 – Published 7 December, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L111501

Abstract

In extensions of the Standard Model with no dimensionful parameters the electroweak phase transition can be delayed to temperatures of order 100 MeV. Then the chiral phase transition of QCD can proceed with six massless quarks. The top-quark condensate destabilizes the Higgs potential through the Yukawa interaction, triggering the electroweak transition. Based on the symmetries of massless QCD, it has been argued that the chiral phase transition is first order. We point out that the top-Higgs Yukawa interaction is nonperturbatively large at the QCD scale, and that its effect on the chiral phase transition may not be negligible, violating some of the symmetries of massless QCD. The remaining symmetries indicate that top quarks condense in a second-order phase transition, but top condensation might also be triggered by a first-order symmetry-breaking transition in the light-quark sector.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (29)

  1. A. D. Sakharov, Violation of CP invariance, C asymmetry, and baryon asymmetry of the Universe, Pis’ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 5, 32 (1967).
  2. V. A. Kuzmin, V. A. Rubakov, and M. E. Shaposhnikov, On the anomalous electroweak baryon number nonconservation in the early Universe, Phys. Lett. 155B, 36 (1985).
  3. E. Witten, Cosmic separation of phases, Phys. Rev. D 30, 272 (1984).
  4. T. Vachaspati, Magnetic fields from cosmological phase transitions, Phys. Lett. B 265, 258 (1991).
  5. K. Kajantie, M. Laine, K. Rummukainen, and M. E. Shaposhnikov, Is There a Hot Electroweak Phase Transition at m(H) Larger or Equal to m(W)?, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 2887 (1996).
  6. F. Csikor, Z. Fodor, and J. Heitger, Endpoint of the Hot Electroweak Phase Transition, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 21 (1999).
  7. Y. Aoki, G. Endrodi, Z. Fodor, S. D. Katz, and K. K. Szabo, The Order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics, Nature (London) 443, 675 (2006).
  8. H. T. Ding et al. (HotQCD Collaboration), Chiral Phase Transition Temperature in (2+1)-Flavor QCD, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 062002 (2019).
  9. E. Witten, Cosmological consequences of a light Higgs boson, Nucl. Phys. B177, 477 (1981).
  10. J. R. Espinosa and M. Quiros, Novel effects in electroweak breaking from a hidden sector, Phys. Rev. D 76, 076004 (2007).
  11. S. Iso, P. D. Serpico, and K. Shimada, QCD-Electroweak First-Order Phase Transition in a Supercooled Universe, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 141301 (2017).
  12. V. Brdar, A. J. Helmboldt, and M. Lindner, Strong supercooling as a consequence of renormalization group consistency, J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2019) 158.
  13. S. R. Coleman and E. J. Weinberg, Radiative corrections as the origin of spontaneous symmetry breaking, Phys. Rev. D 7, 1888 (1973).
  14. R. D. Pisarski and F. Wilczek, Remarks on the chiral phase transition in chromodynamics, Phys. Rev. D 29, 338 (1984).
  15. J. Braun and H. Gies, Chiral phase boundary of QCD at finite temperature, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2006) 024.
  16. G. Servant, Baryogenesis from Strong CP Violation and the QCD Axion, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 171803 (2014).
  17. B. von Harling and G. Servant, QCD-induced electroweak phase transition, J. High Energy Phys. 01 (2018) 159.
  18. P. Baratella, A. Pomarol, and F. Rompineve, The supercooled Universe, J. High Energy Phys. 03 (2019) 100.
  19. M. P. Lombardo, K. Miura, T. J. Nunes da Silva, and E. Pallante, One, two, zero: Scales of strong interactions, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 29, 1445007 (2014).
  20. F. Cuteri, O. Philipsen, and A. Sciarra, On the order of the QCD chiral phase transition for different numbers of quark flavours, arXiv:2107.12739.
  21. P. de Forcrand and M. D’Elia, Continuum limit and universality of the Columbia plot, Proc. Sci. LATTICE2016 (2017) 081 [arXiv:1702.00330].
  22. O. Philipsen, Constraining the phase diagram of QCD at finite temperature and density, Proc. Sci. LATTICE2019 (2019) 273 [arXiv:1912.04827].
  23. Y. Kuramashi, Y. Nakamura, H. Ohno, and S. Takeda, Nature of the phase transition for finite temperature Nf=3 QCD with nonperturbatively O(a) improved Wilson fermions at Nt=12, Phys. Rev. D 101, 054509 (2020).
  24. R. A. Flores and M. Sher, Is Coleman-Weinberg symmetry breaking in the standard model ruled out?, Nucl. Phys. B238, 702 (1984).
  25. T. Hambye, A. Strumia, and D. Teresi, Super-cool dark matter, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2018) 188.
  26. J. Zinn-Justin, Quantum field theory and critical phenomena, Int. Ser. Monogr. Phys. 92, 1 (1996).
  27. R. D. Pisarski and D. L. Stein, Critical behavior of linear ϕ4 models With G×G′ symmetry, Phys. Rev. B 23, 3549 (1981).
  28. P. Calabrese and P. Parruccini, Five loop epsilon expansion for U(n) x U(m) models: Finite temperature phase transition in light QCD, J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2004) 018.
  29. L. T. Adzhemyan, E. V. Ivanova, M. V. Kompaniets, A. Kudlis, and A. I. Sokolov, Six-loop ϵ expansion of three-dimensional U(n)×U(m) models, arXiv:2104.12195.

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. D 104, L111501– Published 7 December, 2021
  • Received 2 September 2021
  • Accepted 1 November 2021
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation