Light Higgs channel of the resonant decay of magnon condensate in superfluid (3)He-B.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26743951.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms10294 and PMC identifier 4729873.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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 (3)He-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 (3)He-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.