English

An alternative spontaneous symmetry breaking pattern for $\rm{U}(1)$ with no gapless Goldstone mode

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2023-11-02 v1

Abstract

An emergent gapless Goldstone mode originates from continuous spontaneous symmetry breaking, which has become a doctrine since the pioneering work by Goldstone [J. Goldstone, Nuovo Cimento \textbf{19}, 154 (1961)]. However, we argue that it is possible for a continuous symmetry group U(1)\rm{U}(1) to make an exceptional case, simply due to the well-known mathematical result that a continuous symmetry group U(1)\rm{U}(1) may be regarded as a limit of a discrete symmetry group ZqZ_q when qq tends to infinity. As a consequence, spontaneous symmetry breaking for such a continuous symmetry group U(1)\rm{U}(1) does not necessarily lead to any gapless Goldstone mode. This is explicitly explained for an anisotropic extension of the ferromagnetic spin-1 biquadratic model. In a sense, this model provides an illustrative example regarding the dichotomy between continuity and discreteness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.00574,
  title  = {An alternative spontaneous symmetry breaking pattern for $\rm{U}(1)$ with no gapless Goldstone mode},
  author = {Huan-Qiang Zhou and Qian-Qian Shi and Yan-Wei Dai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.00574},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables