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 one-loop potential using well-known epsilon-expansion results from the theory of critical phenomena in three spatial dimensions. The theory with the epsilon-corrected potential exhibits much larger fluctuations in the spatial correlations of the order parameter, considerably weakening the strength of the transition.