Theoretical consistency and phenomenology of supercooled cosmological phase transitions

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a supercooled phase transition (PT) in the early Universe. Using high-temperature dimensional reduction (DR), we compute the NLO thermal bubble nucleation rate. By explicitly evaluating fluctuation determinants, we provide a state-of-the-art description of thermal bubble nucleation. As a case study, we consider the SU(2)cSM, an extension of the conformal Standard Model with an additional SU(2)$_X$ gauge sector and scalar field that acquires a vev through radiative symmetry breaking. This symmetry breaking proceeds via a supercooled first-order phase transition. The first part of the thesis introduces the theoretical framework, including effective actions, RG improvements, finite-temperature quantum field theory, effective field theory techniques, and thermal bubble nucleation. The second part applies these methods to the SU(2)cSM. We establish a consistent power-counting scheme, construct the leading-order effective potential, analyse symmetry breaking and parameter space, derive an RG-improved potential, and incorporate thermal corrections. We then apply high-temperature DR to a classically scale-invariant model for the first time, derive the corresponding three-dimensional EFT, and compute the NLO nucleation rate. A detailed numerical evaluation of fluctuation determinants enables a comparison of different approximation schemes and their limitations. Finally, we present the phenomenological implications. We determine phase transition parameters, perform parameter scans, and predict the resulting gravitational wave signals. We find that the supercooled phase transition in the SU(2)cSM produces a strong signal detectable by LISA throughout the parameter space considered, making the model experimentally testable. We also demonstrate that higher-order corrections can significantly affect both phase transition dynamics and gravitational wave predictions.