Where Have All the Goldstone Bosons Gone?

Abstract

According to a commonly held view of spontaneously broken symmetry in gauge theories, troublesome Nambu-Goldstone bosons are effectively eliminated by turning into longitudinal modes of a massive vector meson. This note shows that this is not in fact a consistent view of the role of Nambu-Goldstone bosons in such theories. These particles necessarily appear as gauge excitations whenever they are formulated in a manifestly covariant gauge. The radiation gauge provides therefore the dual advantage of circumventing the Goldstone theorem and making evident the disappearance of these particles from the physical spectrum.