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On the phenomenology of sphaleron-induced processes at the LHC and beyond

Journal of High Energy Physics volume 2019, Article number: 17 (2019) Cite this article

A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

We investigate the phenomenological aspects of non-perturbative baryon- and lepton-number-violating processes at hadron colliders. Such processes, induced by instan- ton/sphaleron configurations of the electroweak gauge fields, are believed to play a crucial role in the generation of baryon asymmetry in the early Universe at finite temperature. On the other hand, at colliders (that represent the zero-temperature high-energy regime) the rate and observability of such processes are still under debate. Motivated by current the- oretical considerations, we construct a modern event generator within the general-purpose Herwig Monte Carlo framework, that aims to capture the most relevant features of the dominant processes. We perform a detailed phenomenological analysis focussing on the Large Hadron Collider, at 13 TeV proton-proton centre-of-mass energy, a potential high- energy upgrade at 27 TeV and the proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC-hh) at 100 TeV. We derive constraints on the expected rates for various parametrisations of our model. We find that all three colliders are capable of providing meaningful information on the nature of instanton/sphaleron-induced processes at various energy scales.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Theoretical Physics Amsterdam and Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Andreas Papaefstathiou

  2. Nikhef, Theory Group, Science Park 105, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Andreas Papaefstathiou

  3. Particle Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Simon Plätzer

  4. Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, ul. Pasteura 5, PL-02-093, Warsaw, Poland

    Kazuki Sakurai

Authors
  1. Andreas Papaefstathiou
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  2. Simon Plätzer
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Correspondence to Andreas Papaefstathiou.

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ArXiv ePrint: 1910.04761

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Papaefstathiou, A., Plätzer, S. & Sakurai, K. On the phenomenology of sphaleron-induced processes at the LHC and beyond. J. High Energ. Phys. 2019, 17 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2019)017

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2019)017

Keywords

  • Phenomenological Models