Flavour symmetry as a Spontaneously Broken Discrete Permutation Symmetry Embedded in Colour

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism where flavour symmetry, as a discrete permutation symmetry of valence and sea quarks, is broken without Goldstone bosons, bridging Nambu-Goldstone and Wigner modes.

Contribution

It proposes a new spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism for flavour symmetry involving quark sea effects, avoiding Goldstone bosons, and connecting different symmetry breaking modes.

Findings

Flavour symmetry can be viewed as a discrete permutation symmetry.

Spontaneous breaking occurs without Goldstone bosons.

The mechanism involves the quark-antiquark sea as a vacuum analogue.

Abstract

A new mechanism for breaking an internal symmetry spontaneously is discussed, which is intermediate between the Nambu-Goldstone and Wigner modes of symmetry breaking. Here the quark-antiquark sea takes the role of the vacuum of the Nambu-Goldstone case. Flavour symmetry becomes a discrete permutation symmetry of the valence quarks with respect to the sea quarks, which can be spontaneously broken without generation of massless Goldstone bosons.