The electroweak sphaleron rate in the high temperature phase of the Standard Model is inversely proportional to the weak-isospin conductivity. So far, only electroweak interactions were included in its computation. Here we take into account quark scattering through strong interactions at leading-log order. These reduce the quark contribution to the conductivity by up to 15 %, and the total conductivity by up to 6 %.
@article{arxiv.2510.20594,
title = {QCD corrections to the electroweak sphaleron rate},
author = {Dietrich Bödeker and Philipp Klose},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20594},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
27 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Added discussion of the size of the QCD correction and of possible higher order effects