Related papers: A cautionary case of casual causality
Physical principles such as unitarity, causality, and locality can constrain the space of consistent effective field theories (EFTs) by imposing two-sided bounds on the allowed values of Wilson coefficients. In this paper, we consider the…
It is usually assumed that a healthy EFT should not allow superluminal propagation. In the presence of gravity, however, the notion of superluminality becomes subtle, since there is no invariant way to compare with an underlying Minkowski…
Within the low-energy effective field theories of QED and gravity, the low-energy speed of light or that of gravitational waves can typically be mildly superluminal in curved spacetimes. Related to this, small scattering time advances…
We present an Effective Field Theory (EFT) formalism which describes the dynamics of non-relativistic extended objects coupled to gravity. The formalism is relevant to understanding the gravitational radiation power spectra emitted by…
Relativistic causality constrains the $S$-matrix both through its analyticity, and by imposing lower bounds on the scattering time delay. These bounds are easiest to determine for spacetimes which admit either a timelike or null Killing…
In the absence of a theory of everything, modern physicists need to rely on other predictive tools and turned to Effective Field Theories (EFTs) in a number of fields, including but not limited to statistical mechanics, condensed matter,…
Effective field theories (EFTs) parametrize our ignorance of the underlying UV theory through their Wilson coefficients. However, not all values of these coefficients are consistent with fundamental physical principles. In this paper, we…
The effective actions describing the low-energy dynamics of QFTs involving gravity generically exhibit causality violations. These may take the form of superluminal propagation or Shapiro time advances and allow the construction of "time…
Much of our intuition about Effective Field Theories (EFTs) stems from their formulation in flat spacetime, yet EFTs have become indispensable tools in cosmology, where time-dependent backgrounds are the norm. In this work, we demonstrate…
The General Relativity Effective Field Theory (GREFT) introduces higher-derivative interactions to parameterise the gravitational effects of massive degrees of freedom which are too heavy to be probed directly. The coefficients of these…
We study constraints from causality and unitarity on $2\to2$ graviton scattering in four-dimensional weakly-coupled effective field theories. Together, causality and unitarity imply dispersion relations that connect low-energy observables…
We consider cosmological constraints arising from the background expansion history on the ef- fective field theory of cosmic acceleration, a theoretical framework that allows for a unified way to classify both models of dark energy and…
Effective field theories (EFT) are strongly constrained by fundamental principles such as unitarity, locality, causality, and Lorentz invariance. In this paper, we consider the EFT of photons (or other $U(1)$ gauge field) and compare…
We extend the effective field theory (EFT) formalism for gravitational radiation from a binary system of compact objects to the case of extended objects. In particular, we study the EFT for a binary system consisting of two infinitely-long…
The stability of Reissner-N\"ordstrom black holes with an extremal mass-charge relation was determined by calculating the propagation speed of gravitational waves on this background in an effective field theory (EFT) of gravity. New results…
We explore the relation between positivity of the energy constraints in conformal field theories and causality in their dual gravity description. Our discussion involves CFTs with different central charges whose description, in the gravity…
In this paper we construct an effective field theory (EFT) that describes long wavelength gravitational radiation from compact systems. To leading order, this EFT consists of the multipole expansion, which we describe in terms of a…
We present a "dictionary" to expedite the identification of potential deviations in gravitational waveforms from those predicted by General Relativity (GR) during the inspiral phase of black hole binaries. Assuming deviations from GR can be…
Effective field theories (EFT) parameterize the long-distance effects of short-distance dynamics whose details may or may not be known. It is known that EFT coefficients must obey certain positivity constraints if causality and unitarity…
As a low energy effective field theory, classical General Relativity receives an infrared relevant modification from the conformal trace anomaly of the energy-momentum tensor of massless, or nearly massless, quantum fields. The local form…