English

Electroweak Sphaleron in a Magnetic field

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-04-26 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Lattice

Abstract

Using lattice simulations we calculate the rate of baryon number violating processes, the sphaleron rate, in the Standard Model with an external (hyper)magnetic field for temperatures across the electroweak cross-over, focusing on the broken phase. Additionally, we compute the Higgs expectation value and the pseudocritical temperature. The electroweak cross-over shifts to lower temperatures with increasing external magnetic field, bringing the onset of the suppression of the baryon number violation with it. When the hypermagnetic field reaches the magitude BY2T2B_Y \approx 2 T^2 the cross-over temperature is reduced from 160160 GeV to 145145 GeV. In the broken phase for small magnetic fields the rate behaves quadratically as a function of the magnetic flux. For stronger magnetic fields the rate reaches a linear regime which lasts until the field gets strong enough to restore the electroweak symmetry where the symmetric phase rate is reached.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.08626,
  title  = {Electroweak Sphaleron in a Magnetic field},
  author = {Jaakko Annala and Kari Rummukainen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.08626},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages, 16 figures, corrected typos, published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:16:17.919Z