Spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Goldstone theorem in non-Hermitian field theories

Alexandre, Jean, Ellis, John, Millington, Peter and Seynaeve, Dries (2018) Spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Goldstone theorem in non-Hermitian field theories. Physical Review D, 98 (4). p. 5001. ISSN 2470-0010

[img]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Available under Licence Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (212kB) | Preview

Abstract

We demonstrate the extension to parity-time (PT)-symmetric field theories of the Goldstone theorem, confirming that the spontaneous appearance of a field vacuum expectation value via minimization of the effective potential in a non-Hermitian model is accompanied by a massless scalar boson. Laying a basis for our analysis, we first show how the conventional quantization of the path-integral formulation of quantum field theory can be extended consistently to a non-Hermitian model by considering PT conjugation instead of Hermitian conjugation. The extension of the Goldstone theorem to a PT-symmetric field theory is made possible by the existence of a conserved current that does not, however, correspond to a symmetry of the non-Hermitian Lagrangian. In addition to extending the proof of the Goldstone theorem to a PT-symmetric theory, we exhibit a specific example in which we verify the existence of a massless boson at the tree and one-loop levels.

Item Type: Article
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Science > School of Physics and Astronomy
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.98.045001
Depositing User: Lashkova, Mrs Olga
Date Deposited: 22 Aug 2018 15:21
Last Modified: 22 Aug 2018 15:27
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/53415

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View Edit View