Superconductivity for Particular Theorists

Abstract

No one did more than Nambu to bring the idea of spontaneously broken symmetries to the attention of elementary particle physicists. And, as he acknowledged in his ground-breaking 1960 article "Axial Current Conservation in Weak Interactions", Nambu was guided in this work by an analogy with the theory of superconductivity, to which Nambu himself had made important contributions. It therefore seems appropriate to honor Nambu on his birthday with a little pedagogical essay on superconductivity, whose inspiration comes from experience with broken symmetries in particle theory. I doubt if anything in this article will be new to the experts, least of all to Nambu, but perhaps it may helf otheres, who like myself are more at home at high energy than at low temperature, to appreciate the lessons of superconductivity.