17–21 Aug 2026
University of Helsinki Main Building
Europe/Helsinki timezone

Nucleation in supercooled cosmological phase transitions

20 Aug 2026, 12:00
15m
F4050 (4th floor) (University of Helsinki Main Building)

F4050 (4th floor)

University of Helsinki Main Building

University of Helsinki Fabianinkatu 33 Finland
talk (15min) Early universe physics, inflation, electroweak phase transitions, and sources for gravitational waves Early Universe Contributions 3

Speaker

Maciej Kierkla (Uppsala University)

Description

I will present an overview of the calculation of the thermal bubble nucleation rate in the context of supercooled cosmological phase transitions. Focusing on the case of “gauge+Higgs” theories, I will discuss the framework of “high-temperature dimensional reduction”. This perturbative approach can be understood as an effective field theory (EFT) at finite temperature. I will present next-to-leading order results and discuss the limitations, such as the use of derivative expansion or the impact of higher-order operators.
I will also show how the NLO nucleation rate gives a phenomenological lower bound on the transition time scale for conformal models.

Authors

Bogumila Swiezewska Jorinde van de Vis (CERN) Maciej Kierkla (Uppsala University) Philipp Schicho (University of Geneva) Tuomas Tenkanen (Helsinki Institute of Physics)

Presentation materials