Finite-temperature behavior of the lattice abelian Higgs model

Thomas Banks*, Eliezer Rabinovici

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

260 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study phase transitions in the lattice version of the abelian Higgs model, a model which can exhibit both spontaneous symmetry breaking and confinement. When the Higgs charge is the basic U(1) unit, we find that the Higgs and confinement regions are not separated by a phase transition and form a single homogenous phase which we call the total screening phase. The model does not undergo a symmetry restoring phase transition at finite temperature. If the Higgs charge is some multiple of the basic unit the model follows the conventional wisdom: there are 3 phases (normal, Higgs and confinement) at zero temperature, two of which disappear above some critical point. We apply the lessons learned from the lattice Higgs model to understand the behavior of the weak interactions at high temperature. In a long appendix we give an intuitive physical picture for the Polyakov-Susskind quark liberating phase transition and show that it is related to the Hagedorn spectrum of a confining model. We end with a collection of effective field theory approximations to various lattice theories.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)349-379
Number of pages31
JournalNuclear Physics B
Volume160
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Dec 1979

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