SEARCH FOR CRITICAL-POINTS IN THE SU(2) HIGGS-MODEL

We study the order of the Higgs phase transition in the SU(2) Higgs model at several values of the gauge coupling for bare quartic coupling =0.5 using Monte Carlo simulations. We determine the internal energy of metastable states on various lattice sizes and estimate that the transition terminates at the critical point located at 1.95<c<2.25. We also apply a recently proposed multihistogram method in our data analysis. At =2.25 and =2.4 our data strongly indicate the presence of a first-order phase transition. For 2.6 we find no indication of a discontinuity in the internal energy on lattices up to size 164 and the transition is either weakly first order or of higher order. © 1990 The American Physical Society.