Scattering amplitudes of massive Nambu-Goldstone bosons

Abstract

Massive Nambu-Goldstone (mNG) bosons are quasiparticles the gap of which is determined exactly by symmetry. They appear whenever a symmetry is broken spontaneously in the ground state of a quantum many-body system and at the same time explicitly by the system’s chemical potential. In this paper, we revisit mNG bosons and show that apart from their gap symmetry also protects their scattering amplitudes. Just like for ordinary gapless Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons, the scattering amplitudes of mNG bosons vanish in the long-wavelength limit. Unlike for gapless NG bosons, this statement holds for any scattering process involving one or more external mNG states; there are no kinematic singularities associated with the radiation of a soft mNG boson from an on-shell initial or final state.