Sphaleron transitions in a realistic heat bath

Abstract

We measure the diffusion rate of Chern-Simons number in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model interacting with a realistic heat bath for temperatures between 1/13 and 1/3 times the sphaleron energy. It is found that the measured rate is close to that predicted by one-loop calculation at the lower end of the temperature range considered but falls at least an orderof magnitude short of one-loop estimate at the upper end of that range. We show numerically that the sphaleron approximation breaks down as soon as the gauge-invariant two-point function yields correlation length close to the sphaleron size.

13 pages, LATeX + 3 figures included as postscript files, to be encapsulated using epsf. Also available as a compressed postscript file by anonymous ftp from maggia.ethz.ch (login ftp, pw ftp; then: cd pub, binary, get sphb.ps.Z). IPS Research Report No. 93-10

References in corpus (2)

• Nonperturbative evaluation of the diffusion rate in field theory at high temperatures
• A realistic heat bath: theory and application to kink-antikink dynamics

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Really Computing Non-perturbative Real Time Correlation Functions
• Physics of Thermal QCD
• Chern-Simons number asymmetry from CP violation at electroweak tachyonic preheating
• Status of the Finite Temperature Electroweak Phase Transition on the Lattice
• Thermalization algorithms for classical gauge theories
• Chern-Simons number diffusion in (1+1)-dimensional Higgs theory
• The electroweak sphaleron on the lattice
• Sphaleron transition rate at high temperature in the 1+1 D abelian Higgs model
• Sphaleron Transition Rate in Presence of Dynamical Fermions