Baryon number violating scatterings in laboratories

Earlier estimates have argued that the baryon number violating scattering cross section in the laboratory is exponentially small so it will never be observed, even for incoming 2-particle energy well above the sphaleron energy of 9 TeV. However, we argue in Ref. [1] that, due to the periodic nature of the sphaleron potential, the event rate for energies above the sphaleron energy may be high enough to be observed in the near future. That is, there is a discrepancy of about 70 orders of magnitude between the two estimates. Here we argue why and how the multisphaleron processes are crucial to the event rate estimate, a very important "resonant tunneling" property that has not been taken into account before. We also summarize the input assumptions and arguments adopted in our estimate when compared to the earlier estimates.  © 2017 American Physical Society