Remark on the QCD-electroweak phase transition in a supercooled Universe

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 6 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.

6 pages; a few explanations and references added, typos corrected, essentially the published version

References in corpus (6)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Novel Effects in Electroweak Breaking from a Hidden Sector
• Chiral phase boundary of QCD at finite temperature
• Baryogenesis from Strong CP Violation and the QCD Axion
• Strong Supercooling as a Consequence of Renormalization Group Consistency
• One,Two,Zero: Scales of Strong Interactions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves
• Can supercooled phase transitions explain the gravitational wave background observed by pulsar timing arrays?
• Supercool exit: Gravitational waves from QCD-triggered conformal symmetry breaking
• Primordial Black Holes from Conformal Higgs
• Ladder top-quark condensation imprints in supercooled electroweak phase transition
• Significance of soft-scale breaking on primordial black hole production in Coleman-Weinberg type supercooling-phase transition
• CP-violating effects on gravitational waves in a complex singlet extension of the Standard Model with degenerate scalars