Gauge and global symmetries at high temperature

Abstract

It is shown how finite-temperature effects in a renormalizable quantum field theory can restore a symmetry which is broken at zero temperature. In general, for both gauge symmetries and ordinary symmetries, such effects occur only through a temperature-dependent change in the effective bare mass of the scalar bosons. The change in the boson bare mass is calculated for general field theories, and the results are used to derive the critical temperatures for a few special cases, including gauge and nongauge theories. In one case, it is found that a symmetry which is unbroken at low temperature can be broken by raising the temperature above a critical value. An appendix presents a general operator formalism for dealing with higher-order effects, and it is observed that the one-loop diagrams of field theory simply represent the contribution of zero-point energies to the free energy density. The cosmological implications of this work are briefly discussed.