B Could Spontaneous symmetry breaking cause momentum change in an atom?

[Matthew-Champion]

TL;DR Summary

If you were to fire a single atom from a fixed point into a chamber of perfect vacuum and measure where it collides with the opposite wall. Could Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the sub atomic particles cause momentum change in the atom, changing the part of the wall the atom interacted with?

If you were to fire a single atom from a fixed point into a chamber of perfect vacuum and measure where it collides with the opposite wall. Could Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the sub atomic particles cause momentum change in the atom, changing the part of the wall the atom interacted with?

 

[Vanadium 50]

No. Do you know what spontaneous symmetry breaking is?

 

[Matthew-Champion]

From what I've read A brief summary of how I understand it is that spontaneous symmetry breaking is a process which allows small fluctuations on a sub atomic level to affect aspects of a larger system and when occurring in a spontaneous manner these fluctuations cannot change or distort the form of the system it is occurring in. I had wondered whether through some mechanism I have not heard about the inability of a spontaneous symmetry break to change the form of say an atom could be translated into a small change in momentum. You have answered my question thank you. If you know of no way than that's good enough for me.

 

[PeterDonis]

A brief summary of how I understand it is that spontaneous symmetry breaking is a process which allows small fluctuations on a sub atomic level to affect aspects of a larger system

No, that's not what spontaneous symmetry breaking is. It can occur even in macroscopic classical systems.

For example, consider a pencil balanced on its point. There is rotational symmetry in the underlying physical law governing the pencil: it is equally likely to fall over in any direction. However, once it does fall over, it will fall over in some specific direction. So the actual outcome of the physical law in this case is not rotationally symmetric--the pencil falls in one particular direction--even though the underlying physical law is. That is spontaneous symmetry breaking: particular solutions of a physical law do not have a symmetry that the law itself has.

 

[Matthew-Champion]

Thank you for the clarification. in this example If the pencil is equally likely to fall in any direction is there an aspect of the underlying law I could assign the change in momentum of the pencil to?
an equal possibility of any outcome implies the pencil was stationary at the start of the experiment and then fell?