Spontaneous Breaking of Lorentz Symmetry and Vertex Operators for Vortices

We first review the spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking in the presence of massless gauge fields and infraparticles. This result was obtained long time ago in the context of rigorious quantum field theory by Frohlich et. al. and reformulated by Balachandran and Vaidya using the notion of superselection sectors and direction-dependent test functions at spatial infinity for the non-local observables. Inspired by these developments and under the assumption that the spectrum of the electric charge is quantized, (in units of a fundamental charge e) we construct a family of vertex operators which create winding number k, electrically charged Abelian vortices from the vacuum (zero winding number sector) and/or shift the winding number by k units. In particular, we find that for rotating vortices the vertex operator at level k shifts the angular momentum of the vortex by k \frac{{\tilde q}}{q}, where \tilde q is the electric charge of the quantum state of the vortex and q is the charge of the vortex scalar field under the U(1) gauge field. We also show that, for charged-particle-vortex composites angular momentum eigenvalues shift by k \frac{{\tilde q}}{q}, {\tilde q} being the electric charge of the charged-particle-vortex composite. This leads to the result that for \frac{{\tilde q}}{q} half-odd integral and for odd k our vertex operators flip the statistics of charged-particle-vortex composites from bosons to fermions and vice versa. For fractional values of \frac{{\tilde q}}{q}, application of vertex operator on charged-particle-vortex composite leads in general to composites with anyonic statistics.Comment: Published version, 15+1 pages, 1 figur

O Experimento na balança: lições de alguns eventos de 2012

Trêss fatos cientÌficos associados à física de altas energias foram intensamente divulgados e discutidos ao longo de 2012: a) o vexame do experimento Opera; b) a descoberta de uma nova partícula pelo LHC, provavelmente o bóson de Higgs; c) a observação de uma linha espectral por volta de 130GeV, em meio aos dados coletados pelo telescópio Fermi desde 2008, e sua possível relação com matÈria escura. Esses fatos merecem o esforÁo de uma an·lise crÌtica para tirarmos algumas liÁıes. Acredito que algumas dessas lições podem servir para o nosso cotidiano de professores e pesquisadores

Entropy from Scaling Symmetry Breaking

The scaling symmetry in conformal quantum mechanics (CQM) can be broken due to the boundary conditions that follow from the requirement of a unitary time evolution of the Hamiltonian. We show that the scaling symmetry of CQM can be restored by introducing a suitable mixed state, which is associated with a nonvanishing von Neumann entropy. We give an explicit formula for the entropy arising from the mixed state in CQM. Our work provides a direct link between the restoration of a broken symmetry and von Neumann entropy.Comment: 13 page