Higher orders for cosmological phase transitions: a global study in a Yukawa model

Abstract

Abstract We perform a state-of-the-art global study of the cosmological thermal histories of a simple Yukawa model, and find higher perturbative orders to be important for determining both the presence and strength of strong first-order phase transitions. Using high-temperature effective field theory, we calculate the free energy density of the model up to $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (y5T4), where y is the Yukawa coupling and T is the temperature. The locations of phase transitions are found using the results of lattice Monte-Carlo simulations, and the strength of first-order transitions are evaluated within perturbation theory, to 3-loop order. This is the first global study of any model at this order. Compared to a vanilla 1-loop analysis, accurate to $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (y2T4), reaching such accuracy enables on average a five-fold reduction in the relative uncertainty in the predicted critical temperature Tc, and an additional ∼ 50% strong first-order transitions with latent heat $$ L/{T}_c^4 $$ L / T c 4 > 0.1 to be identified in our scan.