An argument for unsuppressed anomalous fermion-number violation in high-energy collisions?

We investigate, using the axial (1+1)-dimensional abelian Higgs model as a playground, anomalous fermion-number violation in high-energy two-particle scattering. We integrate out the fermions and argue that the annihilating chiral fermions induce a source term for the topological charge density proportional to the centre-of-mass energy, √s. The resulting effective action for the bosonic fields coincides with the effective action of a system with non-zero chemical potential for the fermions, with μ=1/2 √s. This gives an independent argument for the conjecture that the decay rate of the metastable ground state of the latter system with respect to fermion-number violation coincides to the exponential accuracy with the total cross section for anomalous processes at √s=2μ. (orig.)