Speaker
Description
We quantify the impact of higher-dimensional operators in the thermal effective field theory on bubble nucleation in the classically conformal Abelian-Higgs model. High-temperature dimensional reduction organizes the thermal corrections into a tower of operators in a three-dimensional EFT, and recent results show that one-loop dimension-six terms can dominate over higher-loop corrections to super-renormalizable parameters for the strongest transitions.
We provide a framework for perturbation theory in the full one-loop nucleation rate, in which these operators enter both the bounce action and the fluctuation determinant. The determinant is computed exactly, without a derivative expansion, using the Gel'fand-Yaglom theorem, including
the mixed Goldstone-gauge sector and a consistent treatment of scale-shifting degrees of freedom. This allows us to estimate, within a single consistent power counting, the impact of higher-dimensional operators on the nucleation rate and the derived phase-transition observables. We find that, in this scenario, higher-dimensional operators have a small impact on the nucleation rate and the resulting observables.