Related papers: Accelerated expansion and the Goldstone ghost
The stability of the dark matter particle could be attributed to the remnant $Z_2$ symmetry that arises from the spontaneous breaking of a global U(1) symmetry. This plausible scenario contains a Goldstone boson which, as recently shown by…
We propose a new scenario for early cosmology, where an inflationary de Sitter phase is obtained with a ghost condensate. The transition to radiation dominance is triggered by the ghost itself, without any slow-roll potential. Density…
We construct a little Higgs model with the most minimal extension of the standard model gauge group by an extra U(1) gauge symmetry. For specific charge assignments of scalars, an approximate U(3) global symmetry appears in the…
A light hidden photon or axion-like particle is a good dark matter candidate and they are often associated with the spontaneous breaking of dark global or gauged U(1) symmetry. We consider the dark Higgs dynamics around the phase transition…
We study the creation and evolution of cosmological perturbations in renormalizable quadratic gravity with a Weyl term. We adopt a prescription that implies the stability of the vacuum at the price of introducing a massive spin-two ghost…
In a wide class of three-dimensional Abelian gauge theories with a bare Chern-Simons term, the Lorentz invariance is spontaneously broken by dynamical generation of a non-vanishing magnetic field. A detailed computation of an energy density…
We study linearized massive gravity on the de Sitter background. With a small-enough graviton mass this may have had relevance to inflation, or the present-day cosmic acceleration. Higuchi has shown that this theory has a ghost as long as…
We point out that theories of cosmological acceleration which have equation of state, w, such that 1+w is small but positive may still secretly violate the null energy condition. This violation implies the existence of observers for whom…
By coupling axions strongly to a hidden sector, the energy density in coherent axions may be converted to radiative degrees of freedom, alleviating the ``axion energy crisis''. The strong coupling is achieved by mixing the axion and some…
Motivated by the ghost condensate model, we study the Randall-Sundrum (RS) brane-world with an arbitrary function of the higher derivative kinetic terms, $\mathcal{P}(X)$, where $X=-(\nabla \phi)^{2}$. The five-dimensional Einstein…
We look at some dynamic geometries produced by scalar fields with both the "right" and the "wrong" sign of the kinetic energy. We start with anisotropic homogeneous universes with closed, open and flat spatial sections. A non-singular…
Goldstone modes in the amorphous solid state, resulting from the spontaneous breaking of translational symmetry due to random localisation of particles, are discussed. Starting from a microscopic model with quenched disorder, the broken…
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…
If there are multiple hidden sectors which independently break supersymmetry, then the spectrum will contain multiple goldstini. In this paper, we explore the possibility that the visible sector might also break supersymmetry, giving rise…
We explore perturbations about a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background in Chern-Simons gravity. At large momenta one of the two circularly polarized tensor modes becomes ghostlike. We argue that nevertheless the theory does not exhibit…
A supersymmetric hybrid potential model with low energy supersymmetry breaking scale ($ M_{S}\sim 1-10 Tev$) is presented for both dark matter and dark energy. Cold dark matter is associated with a light modulus field ($\sim 10-100 Mev$)…
We present a particle physics motivated realization of interacting dark energy in which a radiatively stable dark energy sector couples to weakly interacting massive particle dark matter through pure momentum exchange. The dark energy field…
Theories of evolving quintessence are constructed that generically lead to deviations from the w = -1 prediction of non-evolving dark energy. The small mass scale that governs evolution, m_\phi \approx 10^{-33} eV, is radiatively stable,…
We systematically study the most general Lorentz-violating graviton mass invariant under three-dimensional Eucledian group using the explicitly covariant language. We find that at general values of mass parameters the massive graviton has…
In a class of renormalizable three-dimensional abelian gauge theory the Lorentz invariance is spontaneously broken by dynamical generation of a magnetic field $B$. The true ground state resembles that of the quantum Hall effect. An…