Goldstone's Theorem on a Light-Like Plane

Abstract

I review various aspects of chiral symmetry and its spontaneous breaking on null planes, including the interesting manner in which Goldstone's theorem is realized and the constraints that chiral symmetry imposes on the null-plane Hamiltonians. Specializing to QCD with N massless flavors, I show that there is an interesting limit in which the chiral constraints on the null-plane Hamiltonians can be solved to give the spin-flavor algebra SU(2N), recovering a result originally found by Weinberg using different methods.