Critical behavior in the electroweak phase transition.

We examine the behavior of the standard-model electroweak phase transition in the early Universe. We argue that close to the critical temperature it is possible to estimate the effective infrared corrections to the 1-loop potential using well known ε-expansion results from the theory of critical phenomena in 3 spatial dimensions. The theory with the ε-corrected potential exhibits much larger fluctuations in the spatial correlations of the order parameter, considerably weakening the strength of the transition. PACS numbers: 98.80–k, 98.80.Cq, 12.15.–y e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected].