Are There Pressure Waves in the Vacuum?

Abstract

The Higgs vacuum is a kind of medium. In any medium one generally expects sound waves for sufficiently long wavelengths (>> mean free path). I briefly describe how the broken-symmetry vacuum can be viewed as a Bose-Einstein condensate of `phion' particles. This picture yields a natural notion of the `mean free path'. I speculate that this is at the millimeter-centimeter scale.

Comments: 6 pages. Contribution to CPT01 conference, Indiana U., August 2001