Topological Classification of Symmetry Breaking and Vacuum Degeneracy

Abstract: We argue that a general system of scalar fields and gauge fields manifesting vacuum degeneracy induces a principal groupoid bundle over spacetime and that the pattern of spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism are encoded by the singular foliation canonically induced on the moduli space of scalar vacuum expectation values by the Lie groupoid structure. Recent mathematical results in the classification of singular foliations then provide a qualitative classification of the possible patterns of vacuum degeneracy.