Gravitational Waves and Cosmological Observables from First-Order Phase Transitions: Thermal Corrections at Low Temperature

Abstract

We consider the impact on cosmological first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) of low-temperature thermal corrections to the effective potential. These are corrections from degrees of freedom whose field-dependent masses in the true vacuum are much larger than the nucleation temperature, though in the false vacuum the field-dependent masses may be much smaller than the nucleation temperature. We focus on the regime in which the thin-wall approximation is valid, and in which these corrections are small enough that they do not alter the vacuum structure of the theory. Although the general form of these corrections to the thermal effective potential can be quite complicated, we argue that the net effect of all such corrections can be well-modeled in this limit with a single new parameter. We determine the shift in the parameters of the FOPT in terms of this new parameter, and the impact on gravitational wave signals and cosmological observables.