Bubble nucleation with thermal higher-dimensional operators
Abstract
We quantify the impact of higher-dimensional operators in the effective theory for bubble nucleation, focusing on supercooled phase transitions in the classically conformal Abelian-Higgs model. While high-temperature dimensional reduction organizes hard thermal corrections into a tower of operators in a three-dimensional effective field theory, recent results show that dimension-six terms can dominate over higher-loop corrections to the equilibrium thermodynamics of the strongest transitions. To assess their effect on the nucleation rate and the derived near-equilibrium phase-transition observables, we develop a perturbative framework that includes them in the full one-loop nucleation rate. Including higher-dimensional operators both in the bounce action and in the fluctuation determinants, we solve the resulting Sturm-Liouville problem without a derivative expansion, using a modified Gel'fand-Yaglom method. For strongly supercooled transitions, we find that higher-dimensional operators only marginally affect the nucleation rate and the resulting observables. As a byproduct, we delineate the regime of validity of the high-temperature nucleation effective theory in supercooled phase transitions.
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BibTeX
@misc{bernardo2026bubble,
title = {{Bubble nucleation with thermal higher-dimensional operators}},
author = {Fabio Bernardo and Maciej Kierkla and Nicholas Leister and Philipp Schicho and Pedro Schwaller},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.12284},
eprint = {2610.12284},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12284},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Bubble nucleation with thermal higher-dimensional operators
AU - Fabio Bernardo
AU - Maciej Kierkla
AU - Nicholas Leister
AU - Philipp Schicho
AU - Pedro Schwaller
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12284
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12284
AB - We quantify the impact of higher-dimensional operators in the effective theory for bubble nucleation, focusing on supercooled phase transitions in the classically conformal Abelian-Higgs model. While high-temperature dimensional reduction organizes hard thermal corrections into a tower of operators in a three-dimensional effective field theory, recent results show that dimension-six terms can dominate over higher-loop corrections to the equilibrium thermodynamics of the strongest transitions. To assess their effect on the nucleation rate and the derived near-equilibrium phase-transition observables, we develop a perturbative framework that includes them in the full one-loop nucleation rate. Including higher-dimensional operators both in the bounce action and in the fluctuation determinants, we solve the resulting Sturm-Liouville problem without a derivative expansion, using a modified Gel'fand-Yaglom method. For strongly supercooled transitions, we find that higher-dimensional operators only marginally affect the nucleation rate and the resulting observables. As a byproduct, we delineate the regime of validity of the high-temperature nucleation effective theory in supercooled phase transitions.
ER -