Non-conservation of baryon number at high energy in the Standard Model

Citation

Espinosa, Olivier R. (1990) Non-conservation of baryon number at high energy in the Standard Model. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechETD:etd-06062007-160632

Abstract

We calculate the coupling constant and energy dependence of the scattering amplitudes for baryon- and lepton-number violating processes in the context of the standard model, in the semiclassical approximation. It is found that, to leading order in this expansion, the spin-averaged total cross sections for these processes grow as a power of the CM-energy and thus violate the bound imposed by unitarity. This result has a twofold implication: first, perturbation theory in the instanton sector of the electroweak theory must break down at high energies and, second, it strongly suggests that baryon and lepton number non-conservation might be observed experimentally at energies accesible in the near future.

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