Testing the electroweak phase transition in scalar extension models at lepton colliders

Abstract

We study the electroweak phase transition in three scalar extension models beyond the Standard Model. Assuming new scalars are decoupled at some heavy scale, we use the covariant derivative expansion method to derive all of the dimension-6 effective operators, whose coefficients are highly correlated in a specific model. We provide bounds to the complete set of dimension-6 operators by including the electroweak precision test and recent Higgs measurements. We find that the parameter space of strong first-order phase transitions (induced by the $|H|^6$ operator) can be probed extensively in $Zh$ production at future electron-positron colliders.