Baryon- and lepton-number violation by electroweak instantons
- 1 February 1982
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review D
- Vol. 25 (3), 825-837
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.25.825
Abstract
We make a quantitative study of instanton-induced baryon- and lepton-number-violating processes in an SU(2)×U(1) electroweak gauge theory at zero and finite temperatures (in the "dilute-instanton-gas" approximation). As an example we consider a simplified model involving only the proton, neutron, electron, and electron neutrino. At zero temperature the total cross sections for and eleven other similar reactions are of order , where is the total center-of-momentum energy squared in Ge. The neutron decays via with a lifetime of the order years. The cross sections and neutron decay width decrease with temperature because color-electric-charge screening reduces the self-dual-instanton density at finite temperature. At high temperature the cross sections (for a given ) and neutron decay width fall off as in this simplified model. It is suggested that correctly treating the instanton gas as very dense (as discussed by Berg, Luscher, and Stehr) and including finite-energy tunneling solutions could increase the predicted reaction rates.
Keywords
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