Hard Thermal Loops in the Electroweak Theory

Abstract

We derive a thermal effective action for soft fields in the broken phase of the electroweak theory in the limit of a strongly interacting Higgs sector. This action is just the proper generalization of the hard thermal loop effective action of a Yang-Mills theory when there is a Higgs mechanism and for a heavy Higgs boson. One can obtain from this action the thermal corrections to the masses of the W, Z and the photon.