Related papers: The Sphaleron Rate: Where We Stand
After the discovery of the Higgs boson and the rather precise measurement of all electroweak boson's masses the local structure of the electroweak symmetry breaking potential is already quite well established. However, despite being a key…
In an external magnetic field, the energy of the electroweak sphaleron---representing the energy barrier to baryon and lepton number violation---decreases but remains nonzero until the upper Ambjorn-Olesen critical field strength set by the…
Electric charge and color breaking minima along third generation squark directions do appear in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model for particular regions of the corresponding supersymmetric parameters $A_t$, $\mu$, $\tan\beta$,…
We perform an analysis of the behaviour of the electroweak phase transition in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, in the presence of light stops. We show that, in previously unexplored regions of parameter space, the order parameter…
We show that the sphaleron energy which identifies with the (instanton) potential barrier for B-violation is reduced in the presence (background) of an electroweak Z-string. We also show that for large enough Higgs coupling, $\lambda$, the…
We compute the sphaleron rate of $N_f=2+1$ QCD at the physical point for a range of temperatures $200$ MeV $\lesssim T \lesssim 600$ MeV. We adopt a strategy recently applied in the quenched case, based on the extraction of the rate via a…
We measure the diffusion rate of Chern-Simons number in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model interacting with a realistic heat bath for temperatures between 1/13 and 1/3 times the sphaleron energy. It is found that the measured rate is…
We analyze the conventional perturbative treatment of sphaleron-induced baryon number washout relevant for electroweak baryogenesis and show that it is not gauge-independent due to the failure of consistently implementing the Nielsen…
The energy dependence of the electroweak gauge couplings has not been measured above the weak scale. We propose that percent-level measurements of the energy dependence of $\alpha_{1,2}$ can be performed now at the LHC and at future higher…
We start by considering the production rates of sphalerons with different size $\rho$ in the symmetric phase, $T>T_{EW}$. At small $\rho$, the distribution is cut off by the growing mass $M\sim 1/\rho$, and at large $\rho$ by the magnetic…
We point out that the results of many baryogenesis scenarios operating at or below the TeV scale are rather sensitive to the rate of anomalous fermion number violation across the electroweak crossover. Assuming the validity of the Standard…
We describe a new mechanism for the generation of the baryon asymmetry of the universe during a first order electroweak phase transition. The mechanism requires the existence of two (or more) baryon number carrying scalar fields with masses…
The viable window to electroweak baryogenesis in a supersymmetric $U(1)'$ model is studied in light of the 126 GeV Higgs boson. To investigate the decoupling of the sphaleron process in the broken phase, we evaluate the sphaleron rate and…
We use semiclassical methods to study processes which give rise to change of topology and therefore to baryon number violation in the standard model. We consider classically allowed processes, i.e.~energies above the sphaleron barrier. We…
We show how the sphaleron rate (the Minkowski rate for topological charge diffusion) can be determined by analytical continuation of the Euclidean topological-charge-density two-point function, which we investigate on the lattice, using…
We propose a mechanism for baryogenesis in which the baryon asymmetry is generated as an equilibrium response of weak sphalerons in a region where electroweak sphaleron transitions remain unsuppressed, $h/T\lesssim 1$. A nonzero equilibrium…
We investigate `non-local' schemes for baryogenesis at a first order electroweak phase transition, in which the effects of a $CP$ violating condensate on the bubble wall propagate into the unbroken phase where the sphaleron rate is…
We find that the $CP$-violating asymmetry $$ \frac{\Gamma \left(t \rightarrow bW^+ \right) - \Gamma \left(\bar{t} \rightarrow \bar{b}W^- \right)} {\Gamma \left(t \rightarrow bW^+ \right) + \Gamma \left(\bar{t} \rightarrow \bar{b}W^-…
We develop a new method to determine thermal activation rates, such as for bubble nucleation, topology change, \textsl{etc.}, using 4-dimensional Euclidean methods. This allows nonperturbative study on the lattice. We then investigate the…
Measurements of the rates for the hadronic decays B^+- -> pi K along with the CP-averaged B^+- -> pi^+- pi^0 branching ratio can be used to bound and extract the weak phase gamma=-arg(V_ub). Using preliminary CLEO data, we obtain the bounds…