Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and the Goldstone Theorem

Abstract

So far we have concentrated on the chiral symmetry of the QCD Hamiltonian and the explicit symmetry breaking by the quark masses. We have discussed the importance of chiral symmetry for the properties of Green functions with particular emphasis on the relations among different Green functions as expressed through the chiral Ward identities. Now it is time to address a second aspect which, for the low-energy structure of QCD, is equally important, namely, the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking. A (continuous) symmetry is said to be spontaneously broken or hidden if the ground state of the system is no longer invariant under the full symmetry group of the Hamiltonian. In this chapter we will first illustrate this by means of a discrete symmetry and then turn to the case of a spontaneously broken continuous global symmetry.