Thermal Resummation for Very Strong First-order Phase Transitions

Abstract

Effective potentials are a key ingredient for predicting stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds from strong first-order phase transitions in the early universe. Established techniques for a robust computation, including dimensional reduction, rely on a high-temperature expansion that is expected to break down for very strong transitions capable of producing observable backgrounds at next-generation gravitational wave detectors such as LISA. We argue that existing 2PI effective action techniques enable consistent resummation for such transitions, and use them to compute the next-to-leading order effective potential of the Abelian Higgs model for a strong transition in a general covariant gauge. We find that our result can be recovered from a Daisy resummed potential by modifying the power counting, and show explicitly that it satisfies the leading-order Nielsen identity needed for gauge-independent predictions of the bubble nucleation rate and is consistent with prior results for small Higgs condensates.