Lecture Notes on Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and the Higgs mechanism Draft: June 19, 2012 N.P. Landsman Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics, and Particle Physics Radboud University Nijmegen Heyendaalseweg 135 6525 AJ NIJMEGEN THE NETHERLANDS email:
[email protected] website: http://www.math.ru.nl/∼landsman/SSB.html tel.: 024-3652874 office: HG03.740 C'est la dissym´etriequi cre´ele ph´enom`ene(Pierre Curie, 1894) 1 INTRODUCTION 2 1 Introduction Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking or SSB is the phenomenon in which an equation (or system of equations) possesses a symmetry that is not shared by some `preferred' solution. For example, x2 = 1 has a symmetry x 7! −x, but both solutions x = ±1 `break' this symmetry. However, the symmetry acts on the solution space f1; −1g in the obvious way, mapping one asymmetric solution into another. In physics, the equations in question are typically derived from a Lagrangian L or Hamiltonian H, and instead of looking at the symmetries of the equations of motion one may look at the symmetries of L or H. Furthermore, rather than looking at the solutions, one focuses on the initial conditions, especially in the Hamiltonian formalism. These initial conditions are states. Finally, in the context of SSB one is typically interested in two kinds of `preferred' solutions: ground states and thermal equilibrium states (both of which are time-independent by definition). Thus we may (initially) say that SSB occurs when some Hamiltonian has a symmetry that is not shared by its ground state(s) and/or thermal equilibrium states.1 The archetypical example of SSB in classical mechanics is the potential 1 2 2 1 2 4 V (q) = − 2 ! q + 4 λ q ; (1.1) often called the double-well potential (we assume that ! ad λ are real).