The sphaleron strikes back: A response to objections to the sphaleron approximation

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Abstract
The issue of sphaleron-induced baryon decay and various paradoxes related to the instanton method of computation are addressed. By various examples we argue that there is no contradiction between the instanton estimates and sphaleron estimates, and argue that for electroweak theory these estimates correspond to different approximations for distinct phenomena. We also investigate numerically the nature of the classical decay of a sphaleron in the (1+1)-dimensional Abelian Higgs model.