  In the presence of fermionic matter the topologically distinct vacua of the
standard model are metastable and can decay by tunneling through the sphaleron
barrier. This process annihilates one fermion per doublet due to the anomalous
non-conservation of baryon and lepton currents and is accompanied by a
production of gauge and Higgs bosons. We present a numerical method to obtain
local bounce solutions which minimize the Euclidean action in the space of all
configurations connecting two adjacent topological sectors. These solutions
determine the decay rate and the configuration of the fields after the
tunneling. We also follow the real time evolution of this configuration and
analyze the spectrum of the created bosons. If the matter density exceeds some
critical value, the exponentially suppressed tunneling triggers off an
avalanche producing an enormous amount of bosons.
