Non-perturbative phenomena in strong magnetic fields

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that at sufficiently strong magnetic fields, approximately 10^21 tesla, the electroweak sphaleron energy vanishes, and therefore baryon number violation becomes unsuppressed. If magnetic monopoles with mass less than around 100 TeV exist, as predicted by some Pati-Salam -like unification models, they would also be produced in such magnetic fields by the electromagnetic dual of the Schwinger process. Even though these field strengths are currently far beyond reach, it is possible to reach them in principle in sufficiently high energy heavy ion collisions. The purpose of this project is to study these non-perturbative quantum field theory processes in this setting, taking the time and space dependence of the induced magnetic field into account, using both classical field theory and approximative quantum field theory methods. The aim is to determine reliably the collision energy required to catalyse baryon number violation and to produce magnetic monopoles of given mass.