Spontaneous-symmetry-breaking mechanism of adiabatic pumping

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the Higgs mechanism

The Higgs mechanism is very powerful: it furnishes a description of the electroweak theory in the Standard Model which has a convincing experimental verification. But although the Higgs mechanism had been applied successfully, the conceptual background is not clear. The Higgs mechanism is often presented as spontaneous breaking of a local gauge symmetry. But a local gauge symmetry is rooted in ...

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking as the Mechanism of Quantum Measurement

It is proposed that an event that constitutes a quantum measurement corresponds to the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry in the measuring

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

Adiabatic pumping mechanism for ion motive ATPases.

An ion motive ATPase is a membrane protein that pumps ions across the membrane at the expense of the chemical energy of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) hydrolysis. Here we describe how an external electric field, by inducing transitions between several protein configurations, can also power this pump. The underlying mechanism may be very similar to that of a recently constructed adiabatic electron...