Avalanche in the Valley (Fermions, Anomaly and Unitarity in High-Energy Electroweak Interactions)

Abstract

Problems related to fermions, unitarity and chiral anomaly in high energy electroweak interactions, are investigated. Particular attention is paid to the correct functional integration over fermion fields in the background of instanton-anti\-instanton type configurations. This leads to an expansion of correlation functions in terms of a small parameter, $\rho/R$, when the instanton-antiinstanton separation ($R$) is large compared to their sizes ($\rho$). Applying such a method to widely discussed cases of fermion-number violation in the electroweak theory, we conclude that there are no theoretical basis for expecting anomalous cross sections to become observable at energies in the $10$ TeV region.