English

Spontaneous symmetry breaking and linear effective potentials

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-05-30 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The convexity of a scalar effective potential is a well known property, and, in the situation of spontaneous symmetry breaking, leads to the so-called Maxwell construction, characterised by a flat effective potential between the minima of the bare potential. Simple derivations are given here, which show how linear effective potentials arise from non-trivial saddles points which dominate the partition function, for a self-interacting scalar field and for a Yukawa model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.1160,
  title  = {Spontaneous symmetry breaking and linear effective potentials},
  author = {Jean Alexandre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.1160},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

13 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:59:07.034Z