Spontaneous annihilation of high-density matter in the electroweak theory
arXiv:hep-ph/9603224 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.54.2814
Abstract
In the presence of fermionic matter the topologically distinct vacua of the standard model are metastable and can decay by tunneling through the sphaleron barrier. This process annihilates one fermion per doublet due to the anomalous non-conservation of baryon and lepton currents and is accompanied by a production of gauge and Higgs bosons. We present a numerical method to obtain local bounce solutions which minimize the Euclidean action in the space of all configurations connecting two adjacent topological sectors. These solutions determine the decay rate and the configuration of the fields after the tunneling. We also follow the real time evolution of this configuration and analyze the spectrum of the created bosons. If the matter density exceeds some critical value, the exponentially suppressed tunneling triggers off an avalanche producing an enormous amount of bosons.
38 pages, 6 Postscript figures
References in corpus (5)
- Improved Action Method for Analysing Tunneling in Quantum Field Theory
- Fermion sea along the sphaleron barrier
- Sphaleron transitions in the Minimal Standard Model and the upper bound for the Higgs Mass
- The Improved Bounce Solution of SU(2)-Higgs Model
- Decay of high-density matter in the electroweak theory