COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF BARYON NUMBER VIOLATION IN HIGH-ENERGY ELECTROWEAK COLLISIONS

We use semiclassical methods to study processes which give rise to cha nge of topology and therefore to baryon number violation in the standa rd model. We consider classically allowed processes, i.e., energies ab ove the sphaleron barrier. We develop a computational procedure that a llows us to solve the Yang-Mills equations of motion far spherically s ymmetric configurations and to identify the particle numbers of the in and out states. A stochastic sampling technique is then used to map t he region spanned by the topology changing solutions in the energy ver sus incoming particle number plane and, in particular, to determine it s lower boundary, A lower boundary which approaches small particle num ber would be a strong indication that baryon number violation would oc cur in high energy collisions, whereas a lower asymptote at large part icle number would be evidence of the contrary. With our method and the computational resources we have had at our disposal, we have been abl e to determine the lower boundary up to energies approximately equal t o one and a half times the sphaleron energy and observed a 40% decreas e in particle number with no sign of the particle number leveling off. However encouraging this may be, the decrease in incoming particle nu mber is only from 50 particles down to approximately 30. Nevertheless, the formalism we have established will make it possible to extend the scope of this investigation and also to study processes in the classi cally forbidden region, which we plan to do in the future.