Emergent Gauge Bosons

TL;DR

This paper revisits the idea that photons can emerge as Goldstone bosons from a spontaneously broken fermionic theory, proposing a large gauge potential condensate with a small effective potential to avoid observable residual effects.

Contribution

It introduces a model where gauge bosons emerge as Goldstone modes with a large condensate and a tiny effective potential, connecting to broader theoretical ideas.

Findings

Proposes a large gauge potential condensate at high energy scales.

Suggests the effective potential is very small, approaching zero with a vanishing cosmological constant.

Links emergent gauge bosons to black holes and Standard Model parameters.

Abstract

The old idea that the photon is a Goldstone boson emergent from a spontaneously broken theory of interacting fermions is revisited. It is conjectured that the gauge-potential condensate has a vacuum expectation value which is very large, perhaps the GUT/Planck momentum scale, but that the magnitude of the effective potential which generates it is very small, so small that in the limit of vanishing cosmological constant it would vanish. In this way, the threat of unacceptably large observable, noncovariant residual effects is mitigated. The linkage of these ideas to other speculative ideas involving black holes and parametrizations of Standard-Model coupling constants is also described.