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Symmetry-breaking phase transitions are ubiquitous in condensed matter systems and in quantum field theories. There is also good reason to believe that they feature in the very early history of the Universe. At many such transitions topological defects of one kind or another are formed. Because of their inherent stability, they can have important effects on the subsequent behaviour of the system. In the first of these lectures I shall review a number of examples of spontaneous symmetry breaking, many of which will be discussed in more detail by other lecturers, and discuss their general features. The second lecture will be mainly devoted to the conditions under which topological defects can appear and their classification in terms of homotopy groups of the underlying vacuum manifold. In my final lecture, I will discuss the `cosmology in the laboratory experiments which have been done to try to test some of the ideas thrown up by discussions of defect formation in the early Universe by looking at analogous processes in condensed-matter systems.
The fringe pattern that allows geometrical and orbital structure information to be extracted from LIED spectra of symmetric molecules is shown to reflect a symmetry conservation principle. We show that under a field polarization which preserves certa
We review and expand upon recent work demonstrating that Weyl invariant theories can be broken inertially, which does not depend upon a potential. This can be understood in a general way by the current algebra of these theories, independently of spec
We study anomalous chiral symmetry breaking in two-flavour QCD induced by gravitational and QCD-instantons within asymptotically safe gravity within the functional renormalisation group approach. Similarly to QCD-instantons, gravitational ones, assoc
We demonstrate a novel feature of certain phase transitions in theories with large rank symmetry group that exhibit specific types of non-local interactions. A typical example of such a theory is a large-$N$ gauge theory where by `non-local interacti
In this talk, I recall the history of the development of the unified electroweak theory, incorporating the symmetry-breaking Higgs mechanism, as I saw it from my standpoint as a member of Abdus Salams group at Imperial College. I start by describing