Gauge Fields as Goldstone Bosons Triggered by Spontaneously Broken Supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper explores how gauge fields can emerge as Goldstone bosons from spontaneously broken supersymmetry, suggesting that local gauge symmetries may originate from fundamental global symmetries through symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It proposes a novel mechanism where supersymmetry breaking triggers the emergence of gauge fields as Goldstone modes, linking emergent gauge theories to supersymmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Findings

Massless gauge bosons arise as Goldstone modes in broken supersymmetry models.

Lorentz invariance and supersymmetry are spontaneously broken, leading to observable light particles.

Broken supersymmetry effects include a light pseudo-goldstino and gravitino signatures.

Abstract

The emergent gauge theories are reconsidered in light of supersymmetry and an appropriate emergence conjecture is formulated. Accordingly, it might be expected that only global symmetries are fundamental symmetries of Nature, whereas local symmetries and associated massless gauge fields could solely emerge due to spontaneous breaking of underlying spacetime symmetries involved, such as relativistic invariance and supersymmetry. We further argue that this breaking, taken in the form of the nonlinear sigma-model type pattern for vector fields or superfields, puts essential restrictions on geometrical degrees of freedom of a physical field system that makes it to adjust itself in such a way that its global internal symmetry G turns into the local symmetry G_{loc}. Remarkably, this emergence process may naturally be triggered by supersymmetry, as is illustrated in detail by an example of a general supersymmetric QED model which is then extended to the Standard Model and GUTs. The requirement of vacuum stability in such class of models makes both Lorentz invariance and supersymmetry to become spontaneously broken in the visible sector. As a consequence, massless photon and other gauge bosons appear as the corresponding Goldstone and pseudo-Goldstone zero modes and special local invariance is simultaneously generated. Due to this invariance all possible Lorentz violations are turned out to be completely cancelled out among themselves. However, broken supersymmetry effects related to an existence of a light pseudo-goldstino (being essentially a photino) are still left in the theory. It typically appears in the low-energy particle spectrum as the eV scale stable LSP or the electroweak scale long-lived NLSP, being in both cases accompanied by a very light gravitino, that could be considered as some observational signature in favor of emergent supersymmetric theories.