Properties of symmetry restoration in the electroweak vacuum in very high magnetic fields

Abstract

We discuss properties of the electroweak vacuum as a function of an external magnetic field. The interest in these properties arises due to possible existence of the electromagnetically superconducting phase of QCD in the background of a sufficiently strong magnetic field. In the electroweak theory, a superconducting vacuum exists for a well defined range of magnetic background fields, and the interest of the current paper is the behaviour near the upper critical magnetic field. We determine this critical field and calculate the vacuum condensates to leading order.

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures, v2: adjustments made to account for the findings of ref.9