English

Born Again

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-05-24 v2

Abstract

Born's original 1933 theory of nonlinear electrodynamics (in contrast to the later Born-Infeld theory) is acausal for strong fields. We explore the issue of strong-field causality violation in families of theories containing Born and/or Born-Infeld, and many variants that have been previously proposed in contexts that include cosmology and black hole physics. Many of these variants are acausal and hence unphysical. A notable exception is the modified Born-Infeld theory with ModMax as its conformal weak-field limit.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.04167,
  title  = {Born Again},
  author = {Jorge G. Russo and Paul K. Townsend},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.04167},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

25 pages. References added