Level Crossing Along Sphaleron Barriers

Abstract

In the electroweak sector of the standard model topologically inequivalent vacua are separated by finite energy barriers, whose height is given by the sphale\-ron. For large values of the Higgs mass there exist several sphaleron solutions and the barriers are no longer symmetric. We construct paths of classical configurations from one vacuum to a neighbouring one and solve the fermion equations in the background field configurations along such paths, choosing the fermions of a doublet degenerate in mass. As in the case of light Higgs masses we observe the level crossing phenomenon also for large Higgs masses.