Effective action and vacuum instability in the chiral σ-model and the standard electroweak model

We develop a partial expansion of the effective action from fermion integration relevant for spatially small configurations of the meson fields in the chiral σ-model. It is shown that this leads (in this semiclassical approximation) to a vacuum instability. For weak Yukawa coupling, when the semiclassical calculation is valid, this would indicate an instability of the Weinberg-Salam model, implying that the latter is only an effective theory. We give an estimate of the approximate length scale at which this occurs. (orig.)