SUSY variants of the electroweak phase transition

The MSSM with a light right-handed stop and supersymmetric models with a singlet whose vev is comparable to that of the Higgs allow for a strongly first-order electroweak phase transition even for a mass of the lightest Higgs around 100 GeV. After a short review of the standard model situation we discuss these supersymmetric models. We also compare perturbative calculations based on the dimensionally reduced 3-dimensional action with lattice results and present an analytic procedure based on an analogue of the stochastic vacuum model of QCD to estimate the nonperturbative contributions. Received: 26 September 1998 / Revised version: 2 June 1999 / Published online: 15 July 1999