🚀 go-pugleaf

matt@physics.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) writes:
>My understanding is that solid-state theorists do indeed work with
>models in which this happens.  (e.g., massive photons in
>superconductors) It wouldn't surprise me, though, if solid-state
>people know it by a different name than the "Higgs mechanism."  It
>certainly is a very general concept, and it was independently
>discovered by many people.  One book, in fact, refers to it as the
>Brout-Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism!

Ah, you are referring to the "spontaneously broken gauge symmetry" in
superconductors.  When this subject came up in the "Field theory of
solid-state" course I took, no one's name was associated with it.  The
gist of the lecture was that the phase acquired by the complex
Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer wavefunction broke gauge symmetry.  The
broken symmetry led to a sort of

(particle number)(wavefunction phase) >= 2*pi

uncertainty rule, which showed that macroscopic quantum wavefunctions
necessarily involve an uncertain number of particles.  Using this
argument, one can justify harmonic-oscillator-like ladder operators to
create and destroy quasiparticles.  The intuitive justification in the
superconductivity case is that destroyed Cooper pairs become
quasiparticles, i.e. normal electrons.  Good God, are massive photons
involved here somewhere?  I don't recall it from this discussion.

I recall that there was a Goldstone boson associated with the broken
symmetry, but some hand-waving argument was used to rescale its energy
up to some finite value, probably the superconducting gap energy.  Is
this rescaling where the Anderson-Higgs mechanism comes in?

-- 
Alison Chaiken 				alison@wsrcc.com
(510) 422-7129 [daytime] 		or chaiken@cmsgee.llnl.gov
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.