Related papers: The Classical Stability Of The Ghost Condensate
Cosmological solutions for covariant canonical gauge theories of gravity are presented. The underlying covariant canonical transformation framework invokes a dynamical space-time Hamiltonian consisting of the Einstein-Hilbert term plus a…
Cosmological stasis is a new type of epoch in the cosmological timeline during which the cosmological abundances of different energy components -- such as vacuum energy, matter, and radiation -- remain constant despite the expansion of the…
We study a symmetry, schematically Energy -> - Energy, which suppresses matter contributions to the cosmological constant. The requisite negative energy fluctuations are identified with a "ghost" copy of the Standard Model. Gravity…
We explore the nonlinear dynamics of classical field theories containing ghost degrees of freedom, focusing on two coupled scalar fields with opposite kinetic terms in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Using a spacetime…
While in the standard cosmological model the accelerated expansion of the Universe is explained by invoking the presence of the cosmological constant term, it is still unclear the true origin of this stunning observational fact. It is…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
The main consequences of de Sitter Special Relativity to the Standard Cosmological Model of Physical Cosmology are examined. The cosmological constant Lambda appears, in this theory, as a manifestation of the proper conformal current, which…
The current experimentally measured parameters of the Standard Model (SM) suggest that our Universe lies in a metastable electroweak vacuum, where the Higgs field is prone to vacuum decay to a lower state with catastrophic consequences. Our…
Previously defined covariant and gauge-invariant perturbation variables, representing, e.g., the fractional spatial energy density gradient on hypersurfaces of constant expansion, are used to simplify the linear perturbation analysis of a…
We study the cosmological properties of a metastable de Sitter vacuum obtained recently in the framework of type IIB flux compactifications in the presence of three D7-brane stacks, based on perturbative quantum corrections at both…
We construct gravitational modifications that go beyond Horndeski, namely theories with extended nonminimal derivative couplings, in which the coefficient functions depend not only on the scalar field but also on its kinetic energy. Such…
De Sitter solutions play an important role in cosmology because the knowledge of unstable de Sitter solutions can be useful to describe inflation, whereas stable de Sitter solutions are often used in models of late-time acceleration of the…
In order to solve the fine-tuning problem of the cosmological constant, we propose a simple model with the vacuum energy non-minimally coupled to the inflaton field. In this model, the vacuum energy decays to the inflaton during…
Several systems display an equilibrium condensation transition, where a finite fraction of a conserved quantity is spatially localized. The presence of two conservation laws may induce the emergence of such transition in an…
We present a new method to analytically prove global stability in ghost-ridden dynamical systems. Our proposal encompasses all prior results and consequentially extends them. In particular, we show that stability can follow from a conserved…
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…
Negative kinetic energies correspond to ghost degrees of freedom, which are potentially of relevance for cosmology, quantum gravity, and high energy physics. We present a novel wide class of stable mechanical systems where a positive energy…
The Standard Model Higgs potential becomes unstable at large Higgs field values where its quartic coupling becomes negative. While the tunneling lifetime of our current electroweak vacuum is comfortably longer than the age of the universe,…
In this Letter we discuss the issues of the graceful exit from inflation and of matter creation in the context of a recent scenario \cite{RHBrev} in which the back-reaction of long wavelength cosmological perturbations induces a negative…
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…