The Fading of Symmetry Non-restoration at Finite Temperature

Abstract

The fate of symmetries at high temperature determines the dynamics of the very early universe. It is conceivable that temperature effects favor symmetry breaking instead of restoration. Concerning global symmetries, the non-linear sigma model is analyzed in detail. For spontaneously broken gauge symmetries, we propose the gauge boson magnetic mass as a ``flag'' for symmetry (non)-restoration. We consider several cases: the standard model with one and two Higgs doublets in the perturbative regime, and the case of a strongly interacting Higgs sector. The latter is done in a model independent way with the tools provided by chiral Lagrangians. Our results clearly point towards restoration, a pattern consistent with recent lattice computations for global symmetries. In addition, we explicitly verify $BRST$ invariance for gauge theories at finite temperature.