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Spontaneously Broken Subsystem Symmetries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-03-10 v2 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous breaking of subsystem symmetries directly in the context of continuum field theories by calculating the correlation function of charged operators. Our methods confirm the lack of spontaneous symmetry breaking in some of the existing continuum field theories with subsystem symmetries, as had previously been established based on a careful analysis of the spectrum. We present some novel continuum field theory constructions that do exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking whenever allowed by general principles. These interesting patterns of symmetry breaking occur despite the fact that all the theories we study are non-interacting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.12611,
  title  = {Spontaneously Broken Subsystem Symmetries},
  author = {Jacques Distler and Andreas Karch and Amir Raz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.12611},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

25 pages, 2 figures. V2: minor edits to match the published version

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:08:46.846Z