Related papers: Vacuum Instability in Chern-Simons Gravity
The unphysical spin-2 massive degrees of freedom in higher derivative gravity may be either massive unphysical ghosts or tachyonic ghosts. In the last case there is no Planck-scale threshold protecting vacuum cosmological solutions from…
The Chern-Simons exact solution of four-dimensional quantum gravity with nonvanishing cosmological constant is presented in metric variable as the partition function of a Chern-Simons theory with nontrivial source. The perturbative…
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 demonstrate that Cherenkov radiation can be interpreted as ghost instability of a certain type. Solutions of modified gravity theories often contain ghost instabilities. One type of such ghost instability is associated with existence of…
Many theories of modified gravity with higher order derivatives are usually ignored because of serious problems that appear due to an additional ghost degree of freedom. Most dangerously, it causes an immediate decay of the vacuum. However,…
We performed a study of the perturbative instabilities in Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory with a gravitational Chern-Simons term, which is dual to a strongly coupled field theory with both chiral and mixed gauge-gravitational anomaly.…
Lorentz- and CPT-violating models of electrodynamics with Chern-Simons terms are typically plagued by various sorts of instabilities. However, when the Chern-Simons term arises from a slow time variation in a pseudoscalar field with an…
We argue that a cosmic neutrino background that carries non-zero lepton charge develops gravitational instabilities. Fundamentally, these instabilities are related to the mixed gravity-lepton number anomaly. We have explicitly computed the…
A new relation between two-dimensional conformal field theories and three-dimensional topologically massive gauge theories is found, where the dynamical nature of the 3d theory is ultimately important. It is shown that the those primary…
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…
We propose that the Chern-Simons invariant of the Ashtekar-Sen connection is the natural internal time coordinate for classical and quantum cosmology. The reasons for this are a number of interesting properties of this functional, which we…
Topology change in quantum gravity is considered. An exact wave function of the Universe is calculated for topological Chern-Simons 2+1 dimensional gravity. This wave function occurs as the effect of a quantum anomaly which leads to the…
In contrast to scalar and tensor modes, vector modes of linear perturbations around an expanding Friedmann--Robertson--Walker universe decay. This makes them largely irrelevant for late time cosmology, assuming that all modes started out at…
We revisit the problem of the helicity-0 ghost mode of massive graviton in the de Sitter background. In general, the presence of a ghost particle, which has negative energy, drives the vacuum to be unstable through pair production of ghost…
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…
It was demonstrated recently that there is an upper bound of the Chern-Simons coupling of the five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory, beyond which the electrically charged AdS_2 \times S^3 vacuum solution becomes unstable. We generalize…
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 present a new understanding of the unstable ghost-like resonance which appears in theories such as quadratic gravity and Lee-Wick type theories. Quantum corrections make this resonance unstable, such that it does not appear in the…
We verify the consistency of the G\"odel-type solutions within the four-dimensional Chern-Simons modified gravity with the non-dynamical Chern-Simons coefficient, for different forms of matter including dust, fluid, scalar field and…
Dynamical Chern-Simons gravity is an extension of General Relativity in which the gravitational field is coupled to a scalar field through a parity-violating Chern-Simons term. In this framework, we study perturbations of spherically…