Related papers: The New Ekpyrotic Ghost
In the framework of asymptotic safety, we study quantum quadratic gravity in the presence of the Higgs field considered as non-separable from the vacuum. The theory flows to a high energy fixed point where the Higgs field is strongly…
We show that general infrared modifications of the Einstein-Hilbert action obtained by addition of curvature invariants are not viable. These modifications contain either ghosts or light gravity scalars. A very specific fine-tuning might…
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
We present a novel idea for screening the vacuum energy contribution to the overall value of the cosmological constant, thereby enabling us to choose the bare value of the vacuum curvature empirically, without any need to worry about the…
The ekpyrotic phase (a slow contraction cosmic phase before the current expansion phase) manages to solve the main problems of the standard cosmology by means of a scalar field interpreted as a cosmic fluid in the Friedmann equation.…
We perform a thorough study of the theoretical consistency of recently proposed, viable, quadratic modifications of gravity that are functions of the the Gauss-Bonnet invariant, regarding the stability of their perturbations around vacuum,…
We consider a higher dimensional gravity theory with a negative kinetic energy scalar field and a cosmological constant. We find that the theory admits an exact cosmological solution for the scale factor of our universe. It has the feature…
The effective field theory of cosmological perturbations stems from considering a cosmological background solution as a state displaying spontaneous breaking of time translations and (adiabatic) perturbations as the related Nambu-Goldstone…
We explore the possibility that theories with negative kinetic energy (ghosts) can be meta-stable up to cosmologically long times. In classical mechanics, ghosts undergo spontaneous lockdown rather than run-away if weakly-coupled and…
In this paper we consider Quadratic Gravity as a low energy effective field theory of some unknown UV-complete theory of gravity. Using the spin-2 ghost pathology that occurs in Quadratic Gravity, we derive maximum value for the classical…
Motivated by the ghost condensate model, we study the Randall-Sundrum (RS) brane-world with an arbitrary function of the higher derivative kinetic terms, $\mathcal{P}(X)$, where $X=-(\nabla \phi)^{2}$. The five-dimensional Einstein…
In this paper we study a new symmetry argument that results in a vacuum state with strictly vanishing vacuum energy. This argument exploits the well-known feature that de Sitter and Anti- de Sitter space are related by analytic…
We consider the kinematical and dynamical evolution of Friedmann universes with a mixture of non-interacting matter and a ghost-like field, in a scenario analogous to that advocated by the Quintom model. Assuming that the conventional…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
In [1], KKLT give a mechanism to generate de Sitter vacua in string theory. And the scenario, \emph{Landscape}, is suggested to explain the problem of the cosmological constant. In this paper, adopting a simple potential describing the…
In general, to avoid a singularity in cosmological models involves the introduction of exotic kind of matter fields, for example, a scalar field with negative energy density. In order to have a bouncing solution in classical General…
We consider conditions for existence and stability of a static cosmological solution in quadratic gravity. It appears that such a solution for a Universe filled by only one type of perfect fluid is possible in a wide range of the equation…
We present a unifying treatment of dark energy and modified gravity that allows distinct conformal-disformal couplings of matter species to the gravitational sector. In this very general approach, we derive the conditions to avoid ghost and…
We develop a framework in which to make sense of solutions containing the vacuum in Lagrangian gas dynamics. At and near vacuum, the specific volume becomes infinite and enclosed vacuums are represented by Dirac masses, so they cannot be…
In the standard entropic mechanism adopted in the simple Ekpyrotic models to generate the nearly scale-invariant and Gaussian primordial perturbation, the entropy direction is tachyonically unstable. In this paper, we consider the stable…