Thermal Fluctuations and Validity of the 1-Loop Effective Potential

Abstract

We examine the validity of the 1-loop approximation to the effective potential at finite temperatures and present a simple test for its reliability. As an application we study the standard electroweak potential, showing that for a Higgs mass above 70 GeV, and afirly independent of the top mass (with $m_t>90GeV$, the 1-loop approximation is no longer valid for temperatures in the neighborhood of the critical temperature.

15 pages , LATEX, 2 figures (not included but available upon request), DART-HEP-92/08 ``REVISED VERSION''

References in corpus (4)

• Towards the Theory of Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Phase Transition Temperatures at Next-to-Leading Order
• On the phase transition in the scalar theory
• Collapsing Sub-Critical Bubbles

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• Critical and Tricritical Points for the Massless 2d Gross-Neveu Model Beyond Large N
• Applicability of the Linear delta Expansion for the lambda phi^4 Field Theory at Finite Temperature in the Symmetric and Broken Phases
• Thermal Phase Mixing During First Order Phase Transitions
• Critical Behavior in the Electroweak Phase Transition
• Kinetics of Sub-Critical Bubbles and the Electroweak Transition
• Real-time dynamics of false vacuum decay
• Symmetry breaking patterns of the 3-3-1 model at finite temperature
• Reliability of the optimized perturbation theory in the 0-dimensional $O(N)$ scalar field model
• Are oscillons present during a first order electroweak phase transition?
• Thermal Fluctuations at Second Order Phase Transitions
• Do subcritical bubbles hinder first order phase transition?
• Probability Distribution Function of the Coarse-grained Scalar Field at Finite Temperature
• Subcritical Fluctuations at the Electroweak Phase Transition
• Symmetry Aspects in Nonrelativistic Multi-Scalar Field Models and Application to a Coupled Two-Species Dilute Bose Gas
• Stability of the pion string in a thermal and dense medium
• Nonequilibrium Precursor Model for the Onset of Percolation in a Two-Phase System
• Inhomogeneous Field Configurations and the Electroweak Phase Transition
• Baryogenesis in Brief
• A Stochastic Approach to Thermal Fluctuations during a First Order Electroweak Phase Transition