Baryon-number violation in high-energy collisions

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of baryon-number violation induced by electroweak instantons and find that if the naive instanton amplitudes were valid for arbitrarily high energies, the event rate at the Superconducting Super Collider could be a few per hour. A typical event would consist of three ‘‘primary’’ antileptons and seven ‘‘primary’’ antiquark jets, accompanied by ∼85 electroweak gauge bosons, having a sharp threshold in the total subenergy at about 17 TeV. However, the instanton approximation is not valid at such high energy (above the sphaleron energy), so that new theoretical methods are needed.