Abstract:

Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) describes the coupling of hydrodynamics to dynamical electromagnetic fields. In the conventional form of MHD, one introduces a dynamical gauge field and the respective Maxwell's equations by hand. In this talk, we will explore an alternate view of MHD purely based on symmetries without any assumption about the microscopic field content. We will argue that MHD is described by a novel theory of superfluidity, with a partially broken one-form symmetry. We will also discuss the implications of this broken symmetry for constructing hydrostatic partition functions describing MHD. The talk is based on https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01939.