Light Higgs channel of the resonant decay of magnon condensate in superfluid 3He-B

V V Zavjalov,V B Eltsov,P J Heikkinen,G E Volovik,S Autti

doi:10.1038/ncomms10294

V V Zavjalov, V B Eltsov + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10294

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Abstract

In superfluids the order parameter, which describes spontaneous symmetry breaking, is an analogue of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics. Oscillations of the field amplitude are massive Higgs bosons, while oscillations of the orientation are massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons. The 125 GeV Higgs boson, discovered at Large Hadron Collider, is light compared with electroweak energy scale. Here, we show that such light Higgs exists in superfluid 3He-B, where one of three Nambu-Goldstone spin-wave modes acquires small mass due to the spin–orbit interaction. Other modes become optical and acoustic magnons. We observe parametric decay of Bose-Einstein condensate of optical magnons to light Higgs modes and decay of optical to acoustic magnons. Formation of a light Higgs from a Nambu-Goldstone mode observed in 3He-B opens a possibility that such scenario can be realized in other systems, where violation of some hidden symmetry is possible, including the Standard Model.

Highlights

In superfluids the order parameter, which describes spontaneous symmetry breaking, is an analogue of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics
We have observed the interplay of all three spinwave modes, which form a little Higgs field in superfluid 3He-B
The search for similar resonant production of pairs of Standard Model Higgs bosons reported by the ATLAS collaboration[32] has not succeeded yet, our results support the basic physical idea behind this effort. Another system where the light Higgs mode can be observed is the multicomponent condensate in cold gases[33], where interaction between components can be set up to produce the hidden symmetry

Summary

Introduction

In superfluids the order parameter, which describes spontaneous symmetry breaking, is an analogue of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics. Formation of a light Higgs from a Nambu-Goldstone mode observed in 3He-B opens a possibility that such scenario can be realized in other systems, where violation of some hidden symmetry is possible, including the Standard Model. In conventional superconductors with the order parameter of a single complex number, only the symmetry with respect to the change of the wave-function phase is broken. This leads to one NG phase mode and one-amplitude Higgs mode, which was experimentally observed[2,3,4]. In unconventional B-phase of superfluid 3He, the symmetry with respect to relative rotations of the spin and orbital spaces is broken[5], and the order parameter in the zero magnetic field is. Aai 1⁄4 D eiF Raiðn^; yÞ; ð1Þ where D is the gap in the fermionic spectrum, F is the phase and

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