Spontaneous symmetry breaking in classical systems

Classical Phase Space Structure Induced by Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

The collective dynamics of a many-body system is described as a special case of low-energy quantum dynamics, occurring when the ground state breaks a continuous symmetry of the Hamiltonian. This approach is applied to the spontaneous breaking of the rotational symmetry of a nuclear Hamiltonian. It is shown that the excitation operator of the isovector low-lying angular oscillations in deformed ...

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking at the Fluctuating Level in Classical and Quantum Systems

Phase transitions not anticipated from the static behavior of many-body systems may happen however at their dynamic fluctuating level. We observe for the first time this striking and general phenomenon measuring current fluctuations in different stochastic transport models in one and two dimensions [1-3]. While small fluctuations result from the sum of weakly correlated local events, for curren...

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

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in vortex systems with two repulsive lengthscales

Scanning Hall probe microscopy (SHPM) has been used to study vortex structures in thin epitaxial films of the superconductor MgB2. Unusual vortex patterns observed in MgB2 single crystals have previously been attributed to a competition between short-range repulsive and long-range attractive vortex-vortex interactions in this two band superconductor; the type 1.5 superconductivity scenario. Our...