Related papers: Jeans' Ghost
We consider cosmological models with a dynamical dark energy field, and study the presence of three types of commonly found instabilities, namely ghost (when fields have negative kinetic energy), gradient (negative momentum squared) and…
It has been suggested that a scalar field with negative kinetic energy, or ``ghost,'' could be the source of the observed late-time cosmological acceleration. Naively, such theories should be ruled out by the catastrophic quantum…
Spontaneous scalarization is a mechanism that allows a scalar field to go undetected in weak gravity environments and yet develop a nontrivial configuration in strongly gravitating systems. At the perturbative level it manifests as a…
We introduce new techniques that can preserve unitarity of the system including ghost particles. Negative norms of the particles can be involved in zero-norm states by constraints of the physical space. These are useful to apply the…
We present a simple model in which the weak energy condition is violated for spatially homogeneous, slowly evolving fields. The excitations about Lorentz-violating background in Minkowski space do not contain ghosts, tachyons or…
The aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
A tachyon is considered to be sick in the context of particle mechanics, but in field theory just indicates instability of a background. We consider a similar possibility that a ghost in field theory might be just an indication of…
Galileons are higher-derivative theories of a real scalar which nevertheless admit second order equations of motion. They have interesting applications as dark energy models and in early universe cosmology, and have been conjectured to…
Recent work has shown that non-local modifications of the Einstein equations can have interesting cosmological consequences and can provide a dynamical origin for dark energy, consistent with existing data. At first sight these theories are…
The recently proposed infrared modification of gravity through the introduction of a ghost scalar field results in a number of interesting cosmological and phenomenological implications. In this paper, we derive the exact cosmological…
We study the gravitational instability of a general relativistic complex scalar field with a quartic self-interaction in an infinite homogeneous static background. This quantum relativistic Jeans problem provides a simplified framework to…
Phantom scalar theories are widely considered in cosmology, but rarely at the quantum level, where they give rise to negative-energy ghost particles. These cause decay of the vacuum into gravitons and photons, violating observational…
We present several solutions for the five dimensional gravity models in the presence of bulk ghosts and tachyons to argue that these "troublesome" fields can be a useful model-building tool. The ghost-like signature of the kinetic term for…
We explore a dark energy model with a ghost scalar field in the context of the runaway dilaton scenario in low-energy effective string theory. We address the problem of vacuum stability by implementing higher-order derivative terms and show…
We show that starting from initial conditions with stable perturbations, evolution of a galileon scalar field results in the appearance of a ghost later on. To demonstrate this, we consider a theory with k-essence and cubic galileon…
In the framework of Newtonian cosmology or general relativity it is simple to derive a mass scale below which collapsed structures are relatively devoid of baryons. We examine how the inclusion of a chameleon scalar field affects this…
We present a simple class of mechanical models where a canonical degree of freedom interacts with another one with a negative kinetic term, i.e. with a ghost. We prove analytically that the classical motion of the system is completely…
Assuming the existence of a scalar field which undergoes "ghost condensation" and which has a suitably chosen potential, it is possible to obtain a non-singular bouncing cosmology in the presence of regular matter and radiation. The…
We present a novel way to constrain the ghost field with respect to other physical fields present in a given theory such that the theory becomes quantizable. This is achieved by imposing positivity of the total kinetic energy of the system…
Recent attempts to explain the dark matter and energy content of the universe have involved some radical extensions of standard physics, including quintessence, phantom energy, additional space dimensions and variations in the speed of…