Related papers: Ghost Condensation and Gravity in Higgs Phase
We propose a field theory for describing the tachyon on a brane-antibrane system near the minimum of the potential. This field theory realizes two known properties of the tachyon effective action: 1) absence of plane-wave solutions around…
In open string field theory the kinetic operator mixes matter and ghost sectors, and thus the ghost structure of classical solutions is not universal. Nevertheless, we have found from numerical analysis that certain ratios of expectation…
Distance measurements to type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) indicate that the universe is accelerating and it is spatially flat. Otherwise, the rotation curves for galaxies or galaxy clusters reveal the existence of a dark matter component. Then,…
We consider a generalisation of the DGP model, by adding a second brane with localised curvature, and allowing for a bulk cosmological constant and brane tensions. We study radion and graviton fluctuations in detail, enabling us to check…
We investigate how the ghost condensate reacts to black holes immersed in it. A ghost condensate defines a hypersurface-orthogonal congruence of timelike curves, each of which has the tangent vector u^\mu=-g^{\mu\nu}\partial_\nu\phi. It is…
A vacuum instability due to a massless ghost in a hidden sector can lead to an effective equation of state for dark energy that changes smoothly from $w=-3/2$ at large redshifts, to $w\approx-1.2$ today, to $w=-1$ in the future. We discuss…
In this letter we point out that the massive gravity theory with a graviton ghost mode in de Sitter background cannot possess a de Sitter invariant vacuum state. In order to avoid a negative norm state, we must associate the creation…
Poincar\'e gauge theories provide an approach to gravity based on the gauging of the Poincar\'e group, whose homogeneous part generates curvature while the translational sector gives rise to torsion. In this note we revisit the stability of…
We show that starting from initial conditions with stable perturbations, evolution of a galileon scalar field results in the appearance of a ghost later on. To demonstrate this, we consider a theory with k-essence and cubic galileon…
The Hessian's determinant for a version of massive gravity given by an infinite expansion of a square root function of the induced metric, vanishes. We show that it allows us to eliminate one of four scalar fields used to generate the…
Higgs vacuum stability has important consequences for cosmology. In particular, we argue that if the Higgs vacuum is metastable, then the dark matter cannot contain a single black hole of mass less than $10^{15}{\rm g}$ in our entire past…
We consider the prospects for dark matter/energy unification in k-essence type theories. General mappings are established between the k-essence scalar field, the hydrodynamic and braneworld descriptions. We develop an extension of the…
The weak gravity conjecture has been proposed as a criterion to distinguish the landscape from the swampland in string theory. As an application in cosmology of this conjecture, we use it to impose theoretical constraint on parameters of…
String theories suggest the existence of a plethora of axion-like fields with masses spread over a huge number of decades. Here we show that these ideas lend themselves to a model of quintessence with no super-Planckian field excursions and…
We study the effects of the presence of the tachyon field around the black hole. We show that in presence of the tachyon field, unlike the ordinary canonical scalar field, the time evolution of the black hole mass depends on the potential…
Any attempt to regularize a negative tension brane through a bulk scalar requires that this field is a ghost. One can try to improve in this aspect in a number of ways. For instance, it has been suggested to employ a field whose kinetic…
Many theories of modified gravity with higher order derivatives are usually ignored because of serious problems that appear due to an additional ghost degree of freedom. Most dangerously, it causes an immediate decay of the vacuum. However,…
Implications stemming from the inclusion of non-perturbative, confinining effects, as contained in the Stochastic Vacuum Model of Dosch and Simonov, are considered in the context of a, hypothetical, quark-quark `scattering process' in the…
Following earlier studies that provided a consistent theory of kinematics for tachyons (faster-than-light particles) we here embark on a study of tachyon dynamics, both in classical physics and in the quantum theory. Examining a general…
We discuss the possibility that the existence of dark energy may be due to the presence of a spin zero field $\phi(x)$, either elementary or composite. In the presence of other matter field, the transformation $\phi(x)\to \phi(x) +$…