Symmetry breaking and restoration in Lifshitz type theories

Abstract

We consider the one-loop effective potential at zero and finite temperature in scalar field theories with anisotropic space–time scaling. For z=2, there is a symmetry breaking term induced at one loop at zero temperature and we find symmetry restoration through a first-order phase transition at high temperature. For z=3, we considered at first the case with a positive mass term at tree level and found no symmetry breaking effects induced at one loop, and then we study the case with a negative mass term at tree level where we cannot conclude about symmetry restoration effects at high temperature because of the imaginary parts that appear in the effective potential for small values of the scalar field.