Spontaneous symmetry breaking and linear effective potentials

Abstract

The convexity of a scalar effective potential is a well known property, and, in the situation of spontaneous symmetry breaking, leads to the so-called Maxwell construction, characterised by a flat effective potential between the minima of the bare potential. Simple derivations are given here, which show how linear effective potentials arise from non-trivial saddles points which dominate the partition function, for a self-interacting scalar field and for a Yukawa model.

13 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Soliton form factors from lattice simulations
• Quantization leading to a natural flattening of the axion potential
• The Path-Integral Approach to Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Convexity, gauge-dependence and tunneling rates
• Critical behavior in spherical and hyperbolic spaces
• Maxwell Construction for Scalar Field Theories with Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• Visualising quantum effective action calculations in zero dimensions
• Neural network expansion of Euclidean path integrals and its application to interacting scalar fields