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reggepole
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Does anybody have an enough simple example and explanation of spontaneous breaking symmetry in quantum mechanics? When does the process of breaking take place? After or before some small perturbation appears?
reggepole said:When does the process of breaking take place? After or before some small perturbation appears? BTW I read somewhere that this effect does not appear in quantum mechanics.
tavi_boada said:My teacher gave us the following example:
Imagine you have a donkey with two buckets of food. One at his right and one at his left. You have specular symmetry and you are happy, because you're a physicist and you like symmetries.
After a while the animal gets hungry and eats one of the plates, thus breaking the symmetry.How could he chose one of the plates if they where equal? Answer: He's not a physicist.
Kinda stupid now that I see it written out.
Spontaneous breaking symmetry is a phenomenon observed in physics where the symmetry of a system is broken even though the underlying laws of the system are symmetric. This results in the system exhibiting a lower symmetry than the laws governing it.
Spontaneous breaking symmetry occurs when the ground state of a system is not invariant under a symmetry transformation, causing the system to settle into a state with lower symmetry. This can happen due to fluctuations in the system or interactions between different components.
One of the most well-known examples of spontaneous breaking symmetry is the Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to particles in the Standard Model of particle physics. Other examples include ferromagnetism, where the spins of individual atoms align to create a magnetic field, and superfluidity, where a fluid flows without any resistance.
Spontaneous breaking symmetry is a result of the system's inherent properties and does not require any external influence to occur. In contrast, explicit symmetry breaking occurs due to external factors, such as an external field or boundary conditions, that break the symmetry of the system.
Spontaneous breaking symmetry has important implications in various fields of physics, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, and cosmology. It helps explain the origins of mass and the behavior of systems at a macroscopic scale. It also plays a crucial role in understanding phase transitions and the formation of patterns in nature.