Computational Advances in the Study of Baryon Number Violation in High Energy Electroweak Collisions

We present some recent advances in the computational study of baryon number violation in high energy electroweak collisions. We examine classically allowed processes above the sphaleron barrier and, using a stochastic search procedure, we explore the topology changing region in the energy and particle number plane. Finding topology changing classical solutions with small incident particle number would be an indication that baryon number violation becomes unsuppressed in high energy collisions. Starting with a topology changing solution of approximately 50 incoming particles, our Monte-Carlo procedure has produced other topology changing solutions with 40% lower incident particle numbers, with energies up to one and a half times the sphaleron energy. While these solutions still involve a rather large number of incident particles, we have nonetheless demonstrated that our search procedure is effective in reducing the particle number while ensuring topology change. Taking advantage of more powerful computational resources, we plan to extend the search to still higher energies.