Effective field theory for strong phase transitions
Abstract
We show how to construct perturbative effective field theories for strong phase transitions, where the standard tools of high-temperature dimensional reduction fail. By identifying the relevant power counting relations for the couplings, masses and background fields, we construct a controlled perturbative expansion adapted to this regime. We find that the order parameter field remains light at the transition, so that there is a controlled derivative expansion, even though large external fields need to be resummed. The resulting effective field theories for strong phase transitions live in three dimensions and have nonpolynomial field dependence. Applying our framework to a two-scalar model, we verify renormalisation scale cancellation through next-to-next-to-leading order and find decreasing corrections to the latent heat as the perturbative order is increased. Extending to include fermions and gauge fields, we identify a broad class of models in which strong-transition thermodynamics are systematically improvable.
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BibTeX
@misc{gould2026effective,
title = {{Effective field theory for strong phase transitions}},
author = {Oliver Gould and Farbod-Sayyed Rassouli and Paul M. Saffin},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.10692},
eprint = {2610.10692},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10692},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Effective field theory for strong phase transitions
AU - Oliver Gould
AU - Farbod-Sayyed Rassouli
AU - Paul M. Saffin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.10692
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10692
AB - We show how to construct perturbative effective field theories for strong phase transitions, where the standard tools of high-temperature dimensional reduction fail. By identifying the relevant power counting relations for the couplings, masses and background fields, we construct a controlled perturbative expansion adapted to this regime. We find that the order parameter field remains light at the transition, so that there is a controlled derivative expansion, even though large external fields need to be resummed. The resulting effective field theories for strong phase transitions live in three dimensions and have nonpolynomial field dependence. Applying our framework to a two-scalar model, we verify renormalisation scale cancellation through next-to-next-to-leading order and find decreasing corrections to the latent heat as the perturbative order is increased. Extending to include fermions and gauge fields, we identify a broad class of models in which strong-transition thermodynamics are systematically improvable.
ER -