Related papers: Instabilities in the Aether
We investigate the stability against inhomogeneous perturbations and the appearance of ghost modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravitational theories with a non-minimally coupled scalar field, which can be regarded as either the dilaton or a…
We consider a class of field theories with a four-vector field $A_{\mu}(x)$ in addition to other fields supplied with a global charge symmetry - theories which have partial gauge symmetry in the sense of only imposing it on those terms in…
We show that that vector field-based models of the ether generically do not have a Hamiltonian that is bounded from below in a flat spacetime. We also demonstrate that these models possess multiple light cones in flat or curved spacetime,…
An unstable field theory is what we obtain when we linearise the equations of an interacting field theory near an unstable state. Theories of this kind are adopted to model the onset of spontaneous symmetry breakings, when the fields are…
We consider a class of Lorentz-violating theories of gravity involving a timelike unit vector field (the aether) coupled to a metric, two examples being Einstein-aether theory and Ho\v{r}ava gravity. The action always includes the Ricci…
We explore the nonlinear dynamics of classical field theories containing ghost degrees of freedom, focusing on two coupled scalar fields with opposite kinetic terms in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Using a spacetime…
We investigate the stability and gravitational waves (GWs) in the four-dimensional general Einstein-vector theory in a cosmological background. The theory accommodates up to six propagating degrees of freedom, comprising two tensor, two…
We study cosmological applications of extended vector-tensor theories, whose Lagrangians contain up to two derivatives with respect to metric and vector field. We derive background equations under the assumption of homogeneous and isotropic…
Modified theories of gravity usually present new degrees of freedom, as well as higher order derivatives, wrong signs in certain terms and complicated couplings already present in the Lagrangian from the beginning or originated by the field…
In scalar-tensor theories with derivative interactions, backgrounds spontaneously break local Lorentz invariance. We study the motion of perturbations of the scalar, "phonons", on these anisotropic time-dependent backgrounds in curved…
For a wide class of linear Hamiltonian operators we develop a general criterion that characterizes the unstable eigenvalues as the zeros of a holomorphic function given by the determinant of a finite-dimensional matrix. We apply the latter…
We show that the five-dimensional Maxwell theory with the Chern-Simons term is tachyonic in the presence of a constant electric field. When coupled to gravity, a sufficiently large Chern-Simons coupling causes instability of the…
We study the stability under linear perturbations of a class of static solutions of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in $D=n+2$ dimensions with spatial slices of the form $\Sigma_{\k}^n \times {\mathbb R}^+$, $\Sigma_{\k}^n$ an $n-$manifold of…
We report the existence of a ghost- and tachyon-free sector in metric-affine theories of gravity, that is invariant under diffeomorphism and a particular abelian symmetry. In contrast with many studied cases in the literature, the…
We examine the consequences of Lorentz violation during slow-roll inflation. We consider a canonical scalar inflaton coupled, through its potential, to the divergence of a fixed-norm timelike vector field, or "aether." The vector is…
Light-like galileon solutions have been used to investigate the chronology problem in galileon-like theories, and in some cases may also be considered as solitons, evading a non-existence constraint from a zero-mode argument. Their…
A longstanding belief has been that the semimajor axes, in the Newtonian planetary problem, are stable. In the course of the XIX century, Laplace, Lagrange and others gave stronger and stronger arguments in this direction, thus culminating…
We investigate the classical stability of two coupled scalar fields with opposite-sign kinetic terms evolving in 1+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime. In the first part, we characterise unquenched ghostly interactions and present numerical…
We construct the consistent ghost-free covariant scalar-vector-tensor gravity theories with second order equations of motion with derivative interactions. We impose locality, unitarity, Lorentz invariance and pseudo-Riemannian geometry as…
Gravitational effective field theories with nondynamical backgrounds explicitly break diffeomorphism and local Lorentz invariance. At the same time, to maintain observer independence the action describing these theories is required to be…