Optical analogue of spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by tachyon condensation in amplifying plasmonic arrays

TL;DR

This paper explores how amplifying plasmonic arrays can serve as a classical platform to simulate spontaneous symmetry breaking phenomena analogous to tachyon condensation in quantum field theory, using coupled-mode equations and Dirac-like models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical analogue of tachyon condensation, demonstrating symmetry breaking in amplifying plasmonic arrays through analytical and numerical methods.

Findings

Vacuum state is unstable and develops a broken chiral symmetry

Homogeneous nonlinear stationary solutions indicate symmetry breaking

Plasmonic arrays can mimic quantum field theory phenomena

Abstract

We study analytically and numerically an optical analogue of tachyon condensation in amplifying plasmonic arrays. Optical propagation is modeled through coupled-mode equations, which in the continuous limit can be converted into a nonlinear one-dimensional Dirac-like equation for fermionic particles with imaginary mass, i.e. fermionic tachyons. We demonstrate that the vacuum state is unstable and acquires an expectation value with broken chiral symmetry, corresponding to the homogeneous nonlinear stationary solution of the system. The quantum field theory analogue of this process is the condensation of unstable fermionic tachyons into massive particles. This paves the way for using amplifying plasmonic arrays as a classical laboratory for spontaneous symmetry breaking effects in quantum field theory.