Obtaining the sphaleron field configurations with gradient flow

Abstract

We propose a formalism to obtain the electroweak sphaleron, which is one of the static classical solutions, using the gradient flow method. By adding a modification term to the gradient flow equation, we can obtain the sphaleron configuration as a stable fixed point of the flow in the large flow time. Applying the method to the $SU(2)$-Higgs model (the Weinberg angle ${\theta }_W$ is $0$) in four dimensions, we obtain the sphaleron configuration whose energy coincides with previous studies numerically. We can also show that the Chern-Simons number of the solution has a half-integer.

Comments: 17 pages, 4 figures; v2: published version