Related papers: Is negative kinetic energy meta-stable?
I discuss various thoughts, old and new, about the cosmological constant (or dark energy) paradox. In particular, I suggest the possibility that the cosmological ``constant'' may decay as $\Lambda \sim \alpha^2 m_N^3 / \tau$, where $\tau$…
Dark energy constraints have forced viable alternatives that differ substantially from a cosmological constant Lambda to have an equation of state w that evolves across the phantom divide set by Lambda. Naively, crossing this divide makes…
The description of quantum field systems with meta-stable vacuum is motivated by studies of many physical problems (the decay of disoriented chiral condensate, the resonant decay of CP-odd meta-stable states, self-consistent model of QGP…
We show that a massless canonical scalar field minimally coupled to general relativity can become a tachyonic ghost at low energies around a background in which the scalar's gradient is spacelike. By performing a canonical transformation we…
Cosmological observations allow the possibility that dark energy is caused by phantom fields. These fields typically lead to the occurrence of singularities in the late Universe. We review here the status of phantom singularities and their…
We consider a massless, minimally coupled scalar with a quartic self-interaction which is released in Bunch-Davies vacuum in locally de Sitter background of an inflating universe. It was shown, in this system, that quantum effects can…
Linear stability of brane induced gravity in two codimensions on a static pure tension background is investigated. The brane is regularized as a ring of finite circumference in extra space. By explicitly calculating the vacuum persistence…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
Performing an exact diagonalization of the effective spin problem, a ferromagnetic ground state of kinetic origin is shown to emerge in a system of $N$ strongly correlated electrons on a $L$-site ring ($L > N$). This phenomenon is brought…
In this work, the behavior of test particles near a domain wall of a stable false vacuum bubble is studied. It is shown that matter is naturally trapped in the vicinity of a static domain wall, and also, that there is a discontinuity in the…
If an ultraviolet fixed point renders quantum gravity renormalizable, the effective potential for a singlet scalar field -- the cosmon -- can be computed according to the corresponding scaling solution of the renormalization group…
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…
We discuss how to extract information about the cosmological constant from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, considered as an eigenvalue of a Sturm-Liouville problem in a de Sitter and Anti-de Sitter background. The equation is approximated to…
It is well-known that quantum field theory (QFT) induces a huge value of the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, which is outrageously inconsistent with cosmological observations. We review here some aspects of this fundamental theoretical…
We study a model for a non-singular cosmic bounce in N=1 supergravity, based on supergravity versions of the ghost condensate and cubic Galileon scalar field theories. The bounce is preceded by an ekpyrotic contracting phase which prevents…
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…
In classical mechanics the local exponential instability effaces the memory of initial conditions and leads to practical irreversibility. In striking contrast, quantum mechanics appears to exhibit strong memory of the initial state. We…
Regular black holes have become a popular alternative to the singular mathematical black holes predicted by general relativity as they circumvent mathematical pathologies associated with the singularity while preserving crucial black hole…
The new ekpyrotic scenario attempts to solve the singularity problem by involving violation of the null energy condition in a model which combines the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario with the ghost condensate theory and the curvaton mechanism of…
In this work we shall address the ghost issue of $F\left( R,\mathcal{G} \right)$ gravity, which is known to be plagued with ghost degrees of freedom. These ghosts occur due to the presence of higher than two derivatives in the field…