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In physics, symmetry breaking is a phenomenon where a disordered but symmetric state collapses into an ordered, but less symmetric state. This collapse is often one of many possible bifurcations that a particle can take as it approaches a lower energy state. Due to the many possibilities, an observer may assume the result of the collapse to be arbitrary. This phenomenon is fundamental to quantum field theory (QFT), and further, contemporary understandings of physics.
Teodor Atanackovic (born 1945, Sibac, Serbia) is full professor of Mechanics since 1988 at the Faculty of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad. He graduated from the Mechanical Engineering faculty in Novi Sad in 1969. In 1974 he obtained a PhD degree at Department of Mechanics, University of Kentucky, Lexington Ky. USA. He held Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Since 2009 he is full member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and in 2014 he was elected Professor emeritus of the University of Novi Sad.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey symmetries, but the lowest-energy vacuum solutions do not exhibit that same symmetry. When the system goes to one of those vacuum solutions, the symmetry is broken for perturbations around that vacuum even though the entire Lagrangian retains that symmetry.