Related papers: Accelerated expansion and the Goldstone ghost
Simple models are constructed for "acceleressence" dark energy: the latent heat of a phase transition occurring in a hidden sector governed by the seesaw mass scale v^2/M_Pl, where v is the electroweak scale and M_Pl the gravitational mass…
Understanding gravitational collapse requires understanding how $\sim 10^{58}$ nucleons can be destroyed in $\sim 10^{-5}$ seconds. The recent proposal that the endpoint of gravitational collapse can be a "dark energy star" implies that the…
I demonstrate that soft graviton modes in de Sitter spacetimes are the Goldstone modes of the spontaneously broken asymptotic symmetry group of de Sitter space. I then show that any local measurement, including the effects of the…
We explore the physics of a gas of particles interacting with a condensate that spontaneously breaks Lorentz invariance. The equation of state of this gas varies from 1/3 to less than -1 and can lead to the observed cosmic acceleration. The…
We consider hidden sector supersymmetry breakdown in the strongly coupled heterotic $E_8\times E_8$ theory of Ho\v{r}ava and Witten. Using effective field theory methods in four dimensions, we can show that gravitational interactions induce…
We investigate the late-time cosmological dynamics in a simple case of explicit spacetime-symmetry breaking. By expanding in a small symmetry-breaking coefficient we are able to write the Friedmann equations as $\Lambda$CDM + dynamical dark…
We study the exact spherically symmetric solutions in a class of Lorentz-breaking massive gravity theories, using the effective-theory approach where the graviton mass is generated by the interaction with a suitable set of Stuckelberg…
One hope to solve the cosmological constant problem is to identify a symmetry principle, based on which the cosmological constant can be reduced either to zero, or to a tiny value. Here, we note that requiring that the vacuum state is…
It was recently argued that certain relativistic theories at finite density can exhibit an unconventional spectrum of Goldstone excitations, with gapped Goldstones whose gap is exactly calculable in terms of the symmetry algebra. We confirm…
We consider a theory of gravity in which a symmetric two-index tensor in Minkowski spacetime acquires a vacuum expectation value (vev) via a potential, thereby breaking Lorentz invariance spontaneously. When the vev breaks all the…
The recently proposed infrared modification of gravity through the introduction of a ghost scalar field results in a number of interesting cosmological and phenomenological implications. In this paper, we derive the exact cosmological…
We describe how Goldstone bosons of spontaneous symmetry breaking $G \to H$ can reproduce anomalies of UV theories under the symmetry group $G$ at the nonperturbative level. This is done by giving a general definition of Wess-Zumino-Witten…
We propose a new scenario of incorporating neutrino masses in models of TeV scale gravity and large extra dimensions, which can explain the dark energy problem through formation of neutrino condensates. The smallness of the neutrino masses…
Violent cosmic events, from black hole mergers to stellar collapses, often leave behind highly excited black hole remnants that inevitably relax to equilibrium. The prevailing view, developed over decades, holds that this relaxation is…
We present models that simultaneously predict presence of dark energy and cold dark matter along with slow-roll inflation. The dark energy density is found to be of order $({\rm a \;few \;meV})^4$, and the mass of dark matter constituent is…
We study vacuum alignment in theories in which the chiral symmetry of a set of massless fermions is both spontaneously and explicitly broken. We find that transitions occur between different phases of the fermions' CP symmetry as parameters…
The PLANCK observation strengthens the argument that the observed acceleration of the Universe is dominated by the invisible component of dark energy. We address how this extremely small DE density can be obtained in an ultraviolet…
Ghost stars are compact configurations characterized by an arbitrarily small total mass. Such objects require regions of negative energy density -a condition typically regarded as unphysical within the context of conventional stellar…
We continue our studies of the ghost condensate (GC) with sixth-order dispersion relation. Contrary to the GC with quartic dispersion relation, we find that the correction to the Newtonian potential explicitly depends on the space and time…
The local action of an SU(2) gauge theory in general covariant Abelian gauges and the associated equivariant BRST symmetry that guarantees the perturbative renormalizability of the model are given. A global SL(2,R) symmetry of the model is…