Sphaleron

A sphaleron (Greek:σφαλερός "slippery") is a static (time-independent) solution to the electroweak field equations of the Standard Model of particle physics, and it is involved in processes that violate baryon and lepton numbers. Such processes cannot be represented by Feynman diagrams, and are therefore called non-perturbative. Geometrically, a sphaleron is simply a saddle point of the electroweak potential energy (in the infinite-dimensional field space), much like the saddle point of the surface z(x,y)=x−y in three-dimensional analytic geometry.