Level Crossing for Hot Sphalerons

Abstract

We study the spectrum of the Dirac Hamiltonian in the presence of high temperature sphaleron-like fluctuations of the electroweak gauge and Higgs fields, relevant for the conditions prevailing in the early universe. The fluctuations are created by numerical lattice simulations. It is shown that a change in Chern-Simons number by one unit is accompanied by eigenvalues crossing zero and a change of sign of the generalized chirality $\tGf= (-1)^{2T+1} \gf$ which labels these modes. This provides further evidence that the sphaleron-like configurations observed in lattice simulations may be viewed as representing continuum configurations.