An introduction to spontaneous symmetry breaking

An Introduction to Dynamical Electroweak Symmetry Breaking

While this theory is simple and renormalizable, it has a number of shortcomings. First, while the theory can be constructed to accommodate the breaking of electroweak symmetry, it provides no explanation for it – one simply assumes that the potential is of the form in eqn. 2. In addition, in the absence of supersymmetry, quantum corrections to the Higgs mass are naturally of order the largest s...

Nonperturbative Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

One of the most astonishing results of quantum field theory is spontaneous symmetry breaking. One can say that it is the situation when something arises from the quantization. This means that on the quantum level one has something that was not present on the classical level. Coleman and Weinberg [1] write : “ . . . higher-order effects may qualitatively change the character of a physical theory...

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

From Yukawa’s Pion to Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

What we now call particle physics started first as nuclear physics in the 1930s, and I have once proposed to call Ernest Lawrence and Hideki Yukawa the two founders of particle physics: The first invented the cyclotron, the second ‘‘invented’’ the meson theory, which together opened the door to the exploration of ever higher energy phenomena and to the discovery of particles of ever increasing ...

Rough guide to spontaneous symmetry breaking

Understanding spontaneous symmetry breaking is essential to understanding characteristic phenomena of solid-state physics, condensed matter physics, elementary particle physics, and cosmology. I will forego the details of physical applications in order to concentrate on the implications of spontaneous symmetry breaking for general issues concerning laws and symmetries and for the foundations of...