When Matter Matters
Abstract
We study a recently proposed scenario for the early universe: Subluminal Galilean Genesis. We prove that without any other matter present in the spatially flat Friedmann universe, the perturbations of the Galileon scalar field propagate with a speed at most equal to the speed of light. This proof applies to all cosmological solutions -- to the whole phase space. However, in a more realistic situation, when one includes any matter which is not directly coupled to the Galileon, there always exists a region of phase space where these perturbations propagate superluminally, indeed with arbitrarily high speed. We illustrate our analytic proof with numerical computations. We discuss the implications of this result for the possible UV completion of the model.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1304.3903,
title = {When Matter Matters},
author = {Damien A. Easson and Ignacy Sawicki and Alexander Vikman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.3903},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
16 pages, 3 figures. v2 reflects version accepted for publication in JCAP. Changes include a reorganisation of section order, a new figure 1 and additional references