Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the non-abelian anyon fluid Original Research Article

We study the theory of non-relativistic matter coupled to the non-Abelian U(2) Chem-Simons gauge field in (2 + 1) dimensions. We adopt the mean-field approximation in the current algebra formulation already applied to the abelian anyons. We first show that this method is able to describe both “boson-based” and “fermion-based” anyons and yields consistent results over the whole range of fractional statistics. In the non-abelian theory, we find a superfluid (and superconductive) phase, which is smoothly connected with the abelian superfluid phase originally discovered by Laughlin. The characteristic massless excitation is the Goldstone particle of the specific mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. An additional massive mode is found by diagonalizing the non-local, non-abelian hamiltonian in the radial gauge.