DECAY OF HIGH-DENSITY MATTER IN THE ELECTROWEAK THEORY

High-density fermion matter is meta-stable due to the anomalous non-co nservation of baryor and lepton numbers in the electroweak theory. The meta-stable state decays by penetrating the sphaleron barrier separat ing topologically different vacua. The decay happens locally, and resu lts in an annihilation of twelve fermions, accompanied by the producti on of gauge and Higgs bosons. We find numerically local bounce solutio ns determining the decay rate, which are classical paths in imaginary time, connecting two adjacent topological sectors. We also follow the real-time evolution of the bosonic fields after the tunnelling and ana lyze the spectrum of the created bosons.