Quantifying Spontaneously Symmetry Breaking of Quantum Many-body Systems

G. H. Dong, Y. N. Fang, C. P. Sun

Published 2016-09-14Version 1

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is related to the appearance of emergent phenomena, while a non-vanishing order parameter has been viewed as the sign of turning into such symmetry breaking phase. Recently, we have proposed a continuous measure of symmetry of a physical system using group theoretical approach. Within this framework, we study the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the conventional superconductor and Bose-Einstein condensation by showing both the two many body systems can be mapped into the many spin model. Moreover we also formulate the underlying relation between the spontaneous symmetry breaking and the order parameter quantitatively. The degree of symmetry stays unity in the absence of the two emergent phenomena, while decreases exponentially at the appearance of the order parameter which indicates the inextricable relation between the spontaneous symmetry and the order parameter.