Goldstone's theorem

Goldstone's theorem

Goldstone's theorem examines a generic continuous symmetry which is spontaneously broken; i.e., its currents are conserved, but the ground state is not invariant under the action of the corresponding charges. Then, necessarily, new massless (or light, if the symmetry is not exact) scalar particles appear in the spectrum of possible excitations. There is one scalar particle—called a Nambu–Goldstone boson—for each generator of the symmetry that is broken, i.e., that does not preserve the ground state. The Nambu–Goldstone mode is a long-wavelength fluctuation of the corresponding order parameter.