Sphaleron transitions in a realistic heat bath

Abstract

We measure the diffusion rate of Chern-Simons number in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model interacting with a realistic heat bath for temperatures between 1/13 and 1/3 times the sphaleron energy. It is found that the measured rate is close to that predicted by one-loop calculation at the lower end of the temperature range considered but falls at least an orderof magnitude short of one-loop estimate at the upper end of that range. We show numerically that the sphaleron approximation breaks down as soon as the gauge-invariant two-point function yields correlation length close to the sphaleron size.