Speaker
Takafumi Aoki
(ICRR, The University of Tokyo)
Description
Instanton effects in gauge theories with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries are relevant to several phenomenological settings, including electroweak baryon-number violating processes and nonperturbative contributions to axion physics. In such theories, the relevant configurations are not exact classical minima of the action, so evaluating their effects requires some care. Earlier work pointed out a subtle difficulty in this analysis. In this talk, we revisit semiclassical instanton calculus in broken gauge theories and show how this issue can be resolved in a controlled way. We then discuss the implications for phenomenological applications. This talk is based on our recent paper, 2604.02987 [hep-th].
Authors
Takafumi Aoki
(ICRR, The University of Tokyo)
Masahiro Ibe
(Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo)
Satoshi Shirai
(Kavli IPMU)