Related papers: Higgs Phases and Boundary Criticality
We introduce several families of $\mathcal{N}=(2,2)$ UV boundary conditions in 3d $\mathcal N=4$ gauge theories and study their IR images in sigma-models to the Higgs and Coulomb branches. In the presence of Omega deformations, a UV…
In theories with extra dimensions the Standard Model Higgs field can be identified with the internal components of higher-dimensional gauge fields (Higgs-gauge unification). The higher-dimensional gauge symmetry prevents the Higgs mass from…
Just like the weakly interacting QED can support non-perturbative phenomena, like atoms, so can the weak and Higgs interactions. Especially, there are strong field-theoretical arguments that only bound states can be the (quasi-)asymptotic…
In this paper we discuss the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking from the point view of vacuum pairs, considered as ground states of a Yang-Mills-Higgs gauge theory. We treat a vacuum as a section in an appropriate bundle that is…
The Higgs mechanism gives mass to Yang-Mills gauge bosons. According to the conventional wisdom, this happens through the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetry. Yet, gauge symmetries merely reflect a redundancy in the state description and…
It is suggested that the center vortex confinement mechanism, familiar in hadronic physics, may have some relevance to high-T$_\text{c}$ phenomena. We focus specifically on the transition from the superconducting phase to the pseudogap…
We perform in the type II seesaw setting, a detailed study of the dynamical features of the corresponding general renormalizable doublet/triplet Higgs potential that depends on five dimensionless couplings and two mass parameters after…
Conventional gauge-fixing schemes such as R$_\xi$ gauges may lead to a violation of the Higgs-boson low-energy theorem beyond the tree level. To elucidate this fact, we study a simple model whose U(1) gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken,…
Symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases of bosons in $d$ spatial dimensions have been characterized by the action of the protecting global symmetry $G$ on their boundary. The symmetry acts on the boundary in a way that would be…
The thesis is devoted to the problem of colour confinement in the non-Abelian Yang-Mills theory (gluon part of Quantum Chromodynamics). A generalisation of the 3-dimensional Fock-Schwinger gauge is proposed where the Gauss law constraint is…
The dynamics of a cosmological (de)confinement phase transition is studied in nearly conformally invariant field theories, where confinement is predominantly spontaneously generated and associated with a light "dilaton" field. We show how…
Decades of research have revealed a deep understanding of topological quantum matter with protected edge modes. We report that even richer physics emerges when tuning between two topological phases of matter whose respective edge modes are…
If the scalar sector of the Standard Model is non-minimal, one might expect multiple generations of the hypercharge-1/2 scalar doublet analogous to the generational structure of the fermions. In this work, we examine the structure of a…
The order parameters which are thought to detect U(1) gauge symmetry breaking in a superconductor are both non-local and gauge dependent. For that reason they are also ambiguous as a guide to phase structure. We point out that a global…
We enumerate the micro-states in Higgs theories, addressing (i) the number of vacuum states and (ii) the appropriate measure in the quantum path integral. To address (i) we explicitly construct the set of ground state wave-functionals in…
We present a numerical investigation of the dynamics of symmetry breaking in both Abelian and non-Abelian $[S U (2)]$ Higgs models in three spatial dimensions. We find a class of time-dependent, long-lived nonperturbative field…
We study the dynamics of a first-order phase transition in a strongly coupled gauge theory at non-zero temperature and chemical potential, computing nucleation rates and wall speeds from first principles. The gauge theory is the…
The U(1) gauge field is usually induced from the gauge principle, that is, the extension of global U(1) phase transformation for matter field. However the phase itself is realized only for quantum theory. In this paper we introduce the U(1)…
In gauge theory, Higgs fields are responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking. In classical gauge theory on a principal bundle P, a symmetry breaking is defined as the reduction of a structure group of this principal bundle to a subgroup…
We study the effect of adding a matter field to the Z2 gauge model in three dimensions at zero and finite temperature. Up to a given value of the parameter regulating the coupling, the matter field produces a slight shift of the transition…