# Tag Info

3

The symmetry breaking just breaks the symmetry in the electroweak sector of the standard model, it doesn't turn off the interaction--neutrinos become different from electrons, the gauge bosons get mass, etc, but all of those things are still there. In essence, what the symmetry breaking does is make the weak interaction short-ranged.

8

I'll state one version of the theorem, valid for classical systems. I'll not give the most general framework, as things become messy, but this should still give you an idea of how general the result is. We need the following ingredients: Spins: to each vertex of the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^2$, we attach a spin $\phi_x$ taking values in some compact ...

2

There are two SU(3) symmetries you can come across. Basically, SU(N) emerges everywhere when you have N quantum states and some physics does not distinguish these states - then all quantum superpositions of these states make a fundamental representation of SU(N) significant to that physics (but maybe insignificant to some other). Thus in particle physics ...

2

No, the colorful $SU(3)$ of QCD is not broken. However, it is confining which means that all physical objects that may exist in isolation have to be neutral (singlets, invariant) under the whole $SU(3)$. Objects that are charged (not neutral), like the quarks themselves, behave as "individual end points of a rope" and they always try to produce a flux tube ...

2

This is mostly a question of definitions: Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs when the underlying laws of a physical system have a symmetry, but the ground state does not. For an Ising system with $B=0$, $$H = \sum_{i,j} J_{ij} s_i s_j$$ we can see explicitly that the energy of a state $\{s_i\}$ is precisely the same as the energy of the state with every ...

4

In simple language we do not have a Theory Of Everything (TOE) therefore any answer about the ultimate existence of specific laws is a tentative one. What we do have is a set of nested mathematical theories that fit observations mainly in the study of particle physics. These theories extrapolated to the extremely high energies at the beginning of the Big ...

Top 50 recent answers are included