Level-Crossing in the Instanton-Anti-Instanton Valley

Abstract

We study the level crossing of the fermion system described by the euclidean Dirac Hamiltonian in the valley background. One chiral fermion level is shown to cross twice the zero value in the case of well-separated instanton-anti-instanton background. Below a critical separation, however, level crossings are absent. The phenomenon can be interpreted as the transition to a gauge field configuration of purely perturbative nature, below a critical instanton-anti-instanton separation. In the context of high-energy electroweak interactions, our findings seem to definitely invalidate some optimistic argument concerning the observability of baryon number violation based on the use of the optical theorem in conjunction with the valley fields.