On the SU (2) -Higgs phase transition Original Research Article

The properties of the confinement-Higgs phase transition in the SU(2)-Higgs model with fixed modulus are investigated. We show that the system exhibits a transient behavior up to L = 24 along which the order of the phase transition cannot be discerned. To get stronger conclusions about this point, without going to prohibitively large lattice sizes, we have introduced a second (next-to-nearest neighbors) gauge-Higgs coupling (κ2). On this extended parameter space we find a line of phase transitions which become increasingly weaker as κ2 → 0. The results point to a first-order character for the transition with the standard action (κ2 = 0).