The decay of the sphaleron

Abstract Baryon number violation in the electroweak standard model is expected to proceed through classical transitions over the sphaleron barrier connecting vacua of different Chern-Simons number. The required energy is the order of 10 TeV. The event structure is studied in this paper by following the real-time evolution of the sphaleron field configuration. On average, the sphaleron is found to decay into 42 W-bosons and 8 Higgs particles, if the Higgs mass is close to the W-boson mass.