The unmasking of thermal Goldstone bosons - art. no. 125012

The problem of extracting the modes of Goldstone bosons from a thermal back ground is reconsidered in the framework of relativistic quantum field theor y. It is shown that in the case of spontaneous breakdown of an internal bos onic symmetry, a recently established decomposition of thermal correlation functions contains certain specific contributions which can be attributed t o a particle of zero mass. [S0556-2821(98)04122-8].