Spontaneously Broken Subsystem Symmetries

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous breaking of subsystem symmetries directly in the context of continuum field theories by calculating the correlation function of charged operators. Our methods confirm the lack of spontaneous symmetry breaking in some of the existing continuum field theories with subsystem symmetries, as had previously been established based on a careful analysis of the spectrum. We present some novel continuum field theory constructions that do exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking whenever allowed by general principles. These interesting patterns of symmetry breaking occur despite the fact that all the theories we study are non-interacting.

25 pages, 2 figures. V2: minor edits to match the published version

References in corpus (2)

• Generalized Global Symmetries
• Local stabilizer codes in three dimensions without string logical operators

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