Spontaneous breakdown of a non-Abelian symmetry

Abstract

The spontaneous breakdown of SU(2) symmetry is investigated for an isotriplet scalar field. In terms of the path-integral method the in-field transformations which induce the original SU(2) transformations of Heisenberg operators are identified. It is found that the algebra of in-field transformations shows structure quite different from that of the original algebra. It is shown that the discrepancy of the two algebras is caused by an infrared contribution.