Electroweak phase transition triggered by fermion sector

Abstract

To realize first-order electroweak phase transition, it is necessary to generate a barrier in the thermal Higgs potential, which is usually triggered by scalar degree of freedom. We instead investigate phase transition patterns in pure fermion extensions of the standard model, and find that additional fermions with mass hierarchy and mixing could develop such barrier and realize strongly first-order phase transition in such models. In the Higgs potential with polynomial parametrization, the barrier can be generated in the following two patterns: (I) positive quadratic term, negative cubic term and positive quartic term or (II) positive quadratic term, negative quartic term and positive higher dimensional term, such as dimensional 6 operator.