Related papers: Causality bounds from charged shockwaves in 5d
The requirement that particles propagate causally on non-trivial backgrounds implies interesting constraints on higher-derivative operators. This work is part of a systematic study of the positivity bounds derivable from time delays on…
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 derive the shockwave metric in four-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell effective field theory (EFT) by performing an ultra-relativistic boost of the charged black hole solution accompanied by a rescaling of its mass and charge, including…
Positivity bounds on scattering amplitudes provide a necessary condition for a low-energy effective field theory to have a consistent ultraviolet completion. Their extension to gravity theories has been studied in the past years aiming at…
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…
We investigate limitations of causality arguments from flat-spacetime amplitudes, based on the eikonal limit of gravitational scattering, to place constraints on modified gravity. We show that causality constraints are only valid in the…
We derive new positivity bounds for scattering amplitudes in theories with a massless graviton in the spectrum in four spacetime dimensions, of relevance for the weak gravity conjecture and modified gravity theories. The bounds imply that…
In the wave equation obeyed by electromagnetic fields in curved spacetime there are Riemann and Ricci curvature coupling terms to the photon polarisation, which result in a polarisation dependent deviation of the photon trajectories from…
Photons propagating in curved spacetime may, depending on their direction and polarisation, have velocities exceeding the ``speed of light'' c. This phenomenon arises through vacuum polarisation in QED and is a tidal gravitational effect…
In this paper we show that electrically charged black holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity suffer from a superradiant instability. It is triggered by a charged scalar field that fulfills Dirichlet boundary conditions at a mirror located…
We derive causality constraints on the simplest scalar-tensor theories in which black holes differ from what General Relativity predicts, a scalar coupled to the Gauss-Bonnet or the Chern-Simons terms. Demanding that time advances are…
The black hole weak gravity conjecture (WGC) is a set of linear inequalities on the four-derivative corrections to Einstein--Maxwell theory. Remarkably, in four dimensions, these combinations appear in the $2 \to 2$ photon amplitudes,…
Positivity bounds coming from consistency of UV scattering amplitudes are in general insufficient to prove the weak gravity conjecture for theories beyond Einstein-Maxwell. Additional ingredients about the UV may be necessary to exclude…
We distinguish between the notions of asymptotic causality and infrared causality for gravitational effective field theories, and show that the latter gives constraints consistent with gravitational positivity bounds. We re-explore the…
Gravitational waves in general relativity are non-dispersive, yet a host of modified theories predict dispersion effects during propagation. In this work, we consider the impact of dispersion effects on gravitational-wave bursts from highly…
Camanho, Edelstein, Maldacena and Zhiboedov have shown that gravitons can experience a negative Shapiro time delay, i.e. a time advance, in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory. They studied gravitons propagating in singular "shock-wave"…
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…
Positivity bounds - constraints on any low-energy effective field theory imposed by the fundamental axioms of unitarity, causality and locality in the UV - have recently been used to constrain scalar-tensor theories of dark energy. However,…
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…
Positivity bounds are bounds on the Wilson coefficients of an effective field theory. They hold, if the ultraviolet completion satisfies unitarity, microcausality, locality and Lorentz symmetry; accordingly their violation signals a…