Spontaneous symmetry breaking and nambu-goldstone bosons in quantum many-body systems

Abstract

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a general principle that constitutes the underlying concept of a vast number of physical phenomena ranging from ferromagnetism and superconductivity in condensed matter physics to the Higgs mechanism in the standard model of elementary particles. I focus on manifestations of spontaneously broken symmetries in systems that are not Lorentz invariant, which include both nonrelativistic systems as well as relativistic systems at nonzero density, providing a self-contained review of the properties of spontaneously broken symmetries specific to such theories. Topics covered include: (i) Introduction to the mathematics of spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Goldstone theorem. (ii) Minimization of Higgs-type potentials for higher-dimensional representations. (iii) Counting rules for Nambu-Goldstone bosons and their dispersion relations. (iv) Construction of effective Lagrangians. Specific examples in both relativistic and nonrelativistic physics are worked out in detail. © 2010 by the author; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.