Spontaneously Broken Symmetries

Abstract

The phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking is a common feature of phase transitions in both classical and quantum physics. In a first part we study this phenomenon for the case of a global internal symmetry and give a simple proof of Goldstone’s theorem. We show that a massless excitation appears, corresponding to every generator of a spontaneously broken symmetry. In a second part we extend these ideas to the case of gauge symmetries and derive the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism. We show that the gauge boson associated with the spontaneously broken generator acquires a mass and the corresponding field, which would have been the Goldstone boson, decouples and disappears. Its degree of freedom is used to allow the transition from a massless to a massive vector field.