“Gauge Choices, Infrared Pitfalls, and Thermal Effects in Effective Potentials” tackles a longstanding issue of gauge dependence and infrared (IR) divergences in one-loop effective potentials. These are crucial for applications such as inflation, vacuum stability, and phase transitions. It is shown how the multiplicative anomaly which arises from the non-factorisation of elliptic operators in Fermi gauge, can be leveraged to simultaneously improve both gauge independence and IR behavior, aligning results with those obtained in Landau gauge. We show how the Heat Kernel technique transparently incorporates anomaly-driven cancellations from the outset. Significantly, this approach generalises to finite-temperature effective potentials, demonstrating that gauge independence persists across all orders of mass-over-temperature expansion when using the Heat Kernel method. (Read more)