Aspects of the cosmological electroweak phase transition

We study the decay of the metastable symmetric phase in the standard model at finite temperature. For the SU(2)-Higgs model the two wave function correction terms Zφ(φ2,T) and Zχ(φ2,T) of Higgs and Goldstone boson fields are calculated to one-loop order. We find that the derivative expansion of the effective action is reliable for Higgs masses smaller than the W-boson mass. We propose a new procedure to evaluate the decay rate by first integrating out the vector field and the components of the scalar fields with non-zero Matsubara frequencies. The static part of the scalar field is treated in the saddle point approximation. As a by-product we obtain a formula for the decay rate of a homogeneous unstable state. The course of the cosmological electroweak phase transition is evaluated numerically for different Higgs boson masses and non-vanishing magnetic mass of the gauge boson. For Higgs masses above ∼ 60 GeV the latent heat can reheat the system to the critical temperature, which qualitatively changes the nature of the transition. (orig.)