Speaker
Description
A reliable calculation of gravitational waves from a first order phase transition requires an accurate treatment of the thermal evolution of the effective potential. One loop corrections to the thermal potential are well known to miss numerically important contributions leading to theoretical uncertainties that are orders of magnitude in size for common treatments of phase transitions. Dimensional reduction naturally organizes perturbation theory into powers of the coupling constant ensuring that one always is considering contributions to the potential in order of largest to smallest. At next to leading order, dimensional reduction reduces the uncertainties to the percent level. I will also discuss gauge the controversies around gauge invariance and avenues for handling very strong transitions where the high temperature expansion breaks down.