Effective Lagrangian for Nonrelativistic Systems

Abstract: The effective Lagrangian for Nambu-Goldstone bosons (NGBs) in systems without Lorentz invariance has a novel feature that some of the NGBs are canonically conjugate to each other, hence describing $1$ dynamical degree of freedom by two NGB fields. We develop explicit forms of their effective Lagrangian up to the quadratic order in derivatives. We clarify the counting rules of NGB degrees of freedom and completely classify possibilities of such canonically conjugate pairs based on the topology of the coset spaces. Its consequence on the dispersion relations of the NGBs is clarified. We also present simple scaling arguments to see whether interactions among NGBs are marginal or irrelevant, which justifies a lore in the literature about the possibility of symmetry breaking in $1+1$ dimensions.