Sphalerons at finite temperature

Abstract

We construct the sphaleron for several temperature dependent effective potentials. We determine the sphaleron energy as a function of temperature and demonstrate that the sphaleron energy at a given temperature $T$ is well approximated by the sphaleron energy at temperature zero scaled by the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the Higgs field at temperatures $T$ and zero. We address the cosmological upper bound on the Higgs mass.