PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In extensions of the Standard Model with no dimensionful parameters the electroweak phase transition can be delayed to temperatures of order 100 MeV. Then the chiral phase transition of QCD could proceed with 6 massless quarks. The top-quark condensate destabilizes the Higgs potential through the Yukawa interaction, triggering the electroweak transition. Based on the symmetries of massless QCD, it has been argued that the chiral phase transition is first order. We point out that the top-Higgs Yukawa interaction is non-perturbatively large at the QCD scale, and that its effect on the chiral phase transition may not be negligible, violating some of the symmetries of massless QCD. A symmetry breaking top-quark condensation would then happen in a second-order phase transition, a symmetry-breaking first-order transition could occur in the light-quark sector.