Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Broken symmetry in dissipative structures

Ronojoy Adhikari

IMSc, Chennai

The idea of spontaneously broken symmetry plays a pivotal
role in our thinking of condensed matter systems. A broken continuous symmetry guarantees the appearence of a "rigidity", massless excitations transverse to the direction of order, and symmetry
restoring topological excitations. A recurrent question has been to what extent these ideas can be extended to systems out of equilibrium. I will discuss two recent papers :
www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6122/936.short
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.158102
where translational and rotational symmetries are broken out equilibrium. I will discuss the extent to which these experiments allow for the extension of the broken symmetry paradigm to out of equilibrium contexts.