Comments on the possibility of electroweak baryon number violation at high temperatures

Anomalous baryon number violation in the standard electroweak theory was first discussed by 't Hooft, who found it to be suppressed by a large factor exp(-8π²/g²) at zero temperature, due to a large energy barrier separating vacua with different baryon number. One might have expected that in the early Universe or in high-energy collisions, this process would become unsuppressed when the energies involved became comparable to the barrier height. We argue here that in both cases processes violating baryon number are likely to remain suppressed by a least the same zero-temperature factor.