Spontaneous symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in Nature and underlies a wide variety of physical phenomena ranging from superconductivity to the unification of electromagnetic and weak interactions. It occurs in systems where the ground state has a huge degeneracy that is not invariant under a symmetry. The Nambu-Goldstone boson (NGB) is a massless degree of freedom associated with the gapless excitation of the vacuum. Conventional wisdom has it that interactions of NGB depend on the pattern of symmetry breaking, which involves ultraviolet knowledge of the system. In this talk I will describe a new approach to understanding NGBs using only the infrared data, which results in a universality class among seemingly different symmetry breaking patterns. The universality has important implications for probing the nature of the 125 GeV Higgs boson and opens up new frontiers for experimental exploration.
Seminar Speaker: Ian Low, Northwestern University
Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Seminar, Colloquium
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