  Many extensions of the standard model predict heavy metastable particles
which may be modeled as solitons (skyrmions of the Higgs field), relating their
particle number to a winding number. Previous work has shown that the
electroweak interactions admit processes in which these solitons decay,
violating standard model baryon number. We motivate the hypothesis that
baryon-number-violating decay is a generic outcome of collisions between these
heavy particles. We do so by exploring a 2+1 dimensional theory which also
possesses metastable skyrmions. We use relaxation techniques to determine the
size, shape and energy of static solitons in their ground state. These solitons
could decay by quantum mechanical tunneling. Classically, they are metastable:
only a finite excitation energy is required to induce their decay. We attempt
to induce soliton decay in a classical simulation by colliding pairs of
solitons. We analyze the collision of solitons with varying inherent
stabilities and varying incident velocities and orientations. Our results
suggest that winding-number violating decay is a generic outcome of collisions.
All that is required is sufficient (not necessarily very large) incident
velocity; no fine-tuning of initial conditions is required.
