Ring-diagram summations in the finite-temperature effective potential

Abstract

There has been much recent interest in the finite-temperature effective potential of the standard model in the context of the electroweak phase transition. We review the calculation of the effective potential with particular emphasis on the validity of the expansions that are used. The presence of a term that is cubic in the Higgs condensate in the one-loop effective potential appears to indicate a first-order electroweak phase transition. However, in the high-temperature regime, the infrared singularities inherent in massless models produce cubic terms that are of the same order in the coupling. In this paper, we discuss the inclusion of an infinite set of these terms via the ring-diagram summation, and show that the standard model has a first-order phase transition in the weak coupling expansion.