English

Vacuum Topology and the Electroweak Phase Transition

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-09-19 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We investigate if the topology of pure gauge fields in the electroweak vacuum can play a role in classical dynamics at the electroweak phase transition. Our numerical analysis shows that magnetic fields are produced if the initial vacuum has non-trivial Chern-Simons number, and the fields are helical if the Chern-Simons number changes during the phase transition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.00040,
  title  = {Vacuum Topology and the Electroweak Phase Transition},
  author = {Yiyang Zhang and Francesc Ferrer and Tanmay Vachaspati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00040},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:05:17.254Z