The intrinsic pathology of self-interacting vector fields
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2022-10-05 v4 High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We show that self-interacting vector field theories exhibit unphysical behaviour even when they are not coupled to any external field. This means any theory featuring such vectors is in danger of being unphysical, an alarming prospect for many proposals in cosmology, gravity, high energy physics and beyond. The problem arises when vector fields with healthy configurations naturally reach a point where time evolution is mathematically ill-defined. We develop tools to easily identify this issue, and provide a simple and unifying framework to investigate it.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2205.07784,
title = {The intrinsic pathology of self-interacting vector fields},
author = {Andrew Coates and Fethi M. Ramazanoğlu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07784},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
5+4 pages, 3+2 figures. Minor changes to bring into line with published version