Anomalous Violation of Conservation Laws in Minkowski Space

Abstract

We consider the evolution of quantum fermi fields in Minkowski gauge field backgrounds. Our motivation is the study of anomalous fermion number violating processes. We derive selection rules for fermion scattering amplitudes which relate the violation of fermionic charge to the change in winding between early and late times of the vacuum part of the gauge field. We find that the amount of fermion number violation is always integer, even when the topological charge of the gauge field is fractional. As an explicit example, we apply our results to spherically symmetric Minkowski solutions.

30 pgs., LaTeX with optional PicTex figures, JHU-TIPAC-940017, HUTP-A0/03

References in corpus (4)

• Minkowski Space Non-Abelian Classical Solutions with Non-Integer Winding Number Change
• Fermion Production in the Background of Minkowski Space Classical Solutions in Spontaneously Broken Gauge Theory
• Quantum Scattering from Classical Field Theory
• Spherical Shells of Classical Gauge Field and their Topological Charge as a Perturbative Expansion

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Sphalerons, spectral flow, and anomalies
• Spectral flow of chiral fermions in nondissipative Yang-Mills gauge field backgrounds
• Collision Induced Decays of Electroweak Solitons: Fermion Number Violation with Two and Few Initial Particles
• Anomalous commutators and electroweak baryogenesis
• Anomalous Violation of Conservation Laws in Minkowski Space: Spontaneously Broken Gauge Theories