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In superfluids the order parameter, which describes spontaneous symmetry breaking, is an analogue of the Higgs field in the Standard Model of particle physics. Oscillations of the field amplitude are massive Higgs bosons, while oscillations of the orientation are massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons. The 125 GeV Higgs boson, discovered at Large Hadron Collider, is light compared with electroweak energy scale. Here, we show that such light Higgs exists in superfluid 3He-B, where one of three Nambu-Goldstone spin-wave modes acquires small mass due to the spin–orbit interaction. Other modes become optical and acoustic magnons. We observe parametric decay of Bose-Einstein condensate of optical magnons to light Higgs modes and decay of optical to acoustic magnons. Formation of a light Higgs from a Nambu-Goldstone mode observed in 3He-B opens a possibility that such scenario can be realized in other systems, where violation of some hidden symmetry is possible, including the Standard Model.

In superfluid3 He-B externally pumped quantized spin-wave excitations or magnons spontaneously form a Bose-Einstein condensate in a 3-dimensional trap created with the order-parameter texture and a shallow minimum in the polarizing field. The condensation is manifested by coherent precession of the magnetization with a common frequency in a large volume. The trap shape is controlled by the profile of the applied magnetic field and by the condensate itself via the spin-orbit interaction. The trapping potential can be experimentally determined with the spectroscopy of the magnon levels in the trap. We have measured the decay of the ground state condensates after switching off the pumping in the temperature range (0.14 ÷ 0.2)T c . Two contributions to the relaxation are identified: (1) spin diffusion with the diffusion coefficient proportional to the density of thermal quasiparticles and (2) the approximately temperature-independent radiation damping caused by the losses in the NMR pick-up circuit. The measured dependence of the relaxation on the shape of the trapping potential is in a good agreement with our calculations based on the magnetic field profile and the magnon-modified texture. Our values for the spin diffusion coefficient at low temperatures agree with the theoretical prediction and earlier measurements at temperatures above 0.5T c .

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