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Spontaneously broken spacetime symmetries and Goldstone's theorem
1Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Physical Review Letters
|March 23, 2002
Abstract:
Goldstone's theorem states that there is a massless mode for each broken symmetry generator. It has been known for a long time that the naive generalization of this counting fails to give the correct number of massless modes for spontaneously broken spacetime symmetries. We explain how to get the right count of massless modes in the general case, and discuss examples involving spontaneously broken Poincaré and conformal invariance.