Symmetry breaking

In physics, symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which (infinitesimally) small fluctuations acting on a system crossing a critical point decide the system's fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. To an outside observer unaware of the fluctuations (or "noise"), the choice will appear arbitrary. This process is called symmetry "breaking", because such transitions usually bring the system from a symmetric but disorderly state into one or more definite states. Symmetry breaking is supposed to play a major role in pattern formation.

In 1972, Nobel laureate P.W. Anderson used the idea of symmetry breaking to show some of the drawbacks of reductionism in his paper titled "More is different" in Science.

Symmetry breaking can be distinguished into two types, explicit symmetry breaking and spontaneous symmetry breaking, characterized by whether the equations of motion fail to be invariant or the ground state fails to be invariant.

In explicit symmetry breaking, the equations of motion describing a system are variant under the broken symmetry.

In spontaneous symmetry breaking, the equations of motion of the system are invariant, but the system is not because the background (spacetime) of the system, its vacuum, is non-invariant. Such a symmetry breaking is parametrized by an order parameter. A special case of this type of symmetry breaking is dynamical symmetry breaking.

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