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Symmetry breaking at a topological phase transition
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Faulkner, Michael (2024) Symmetry breaking at a topological phase transition. Physical Review B (Condensed Matter and Materials Physics), 109 (8). 085405. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.109.085405 ISSN 1098-0121.
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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.109.085405
Abstract
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a foundational concept in physics. In condensed matter, it characterizes conventional continuous phase transitions but is absent at topological phase transitions such as the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) transition—as in the BKT case the expected norm (i.e., the magnitude) of the U(1) order parameter vanishes in the thermodynamic limit at all nonzero temperatures. Phenomena consistent with low-temperature broken symmetry have been observed, however, in many different BKT experiments. Examples include recent experiments on superconducting films and the seminal work on two-dimensional arrays of Josephson junctions. While the inaccessibility of the above thermodynamic limit partially explains this paradox in finite systems, the full dynamical framework of symmetry breaking at the BKT transition remains unresolved. Here we provide this by introducing the broader concept of general symmetry breaking. This encompasses both spontaneous symmetry breaking and the BKT case by allowing the expected norm of the order parameter to go to zero in the thermodynamic limit, provided its directional phase fluctuations are asymptotically smaller. We demonstrate this asymptotically slow directional mixing in the low-temperature BKT phase. This explicitly shows that the order parameter arbitrarily chooses some well-defined direction in the thermodynamic limit, predicting negligible phase fluctuations compared to the expected norm in arbitrarily large experimental BKT systems. Our results provide a model for directional mixing timescales across the diverse array of experimental BKT systems. We suggest various experiments
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | Q Science > QC Physics | ||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Engineering > Engineering | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Broken symmetry (Physics), Symmetry (Physics), Topology | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Physical Review B (Condensed Matter and Materials Physics) | ||||||
Publisher: | American Physical Society | ||||||
ISSN: | 1098-0121 | ||||||
Official Date: | 15 February 2024 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 109 | ||||||
Number: | 8 | ||||||
Article Number: | 085405 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevB.109.085405 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 6 March 2024 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 6 March 2024 | ||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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