Related papers: Phantom without UV pathology
Phantom fields with negative kinetic energy are often plagued by the vacuum quantum instability in the ultraviolet region. We present a Lorentz-violating dark energy model free from this problem and show that the crossing of the…
We consider a model with Lorentz-violating vector field condensates, in which dispersion laws of all perturbations, including tensor modes, undergo non-trivial modification in the infrared. The model is free of ghosts and tachyons at high…
It has been suggested that a scalar field with negative kinetic energy, or ``ghost,'' could be the source of the observed late-time cosmological acceleration. Naively, such theories should be ruled out by the catastrophic quantum…
We consider the evolution of FRW cosmological models and linear perturbations of tachyon matter rolling towards a minimum of its potential. The tachyon coupled to gravity is described by an effective 4d field theory of string theory…
In the present paper we analyze the spectrum of quasinormal modes for massive scalar and Dirac fields, allowing for both tardyonic ($\mu^2 >0$) and tachyonic ($\mu^2 <0$) masses, in the expanding and rotating cosmological background. The…
We present a detailed study of cosmological effects of homogeneous tachyon matter coexisting with non-relativistic matter and radiation, concentrating on the inverse square potential and the exponential potential for the tachyonic scalar…
We investigate the stability against inhomogeneous perturbations and the appearance of ghost modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravitational theories with a non-minimally coupled scalar field, which can be regarded as either the dilaton or a…
We show that a massless canonical scalar field minimally coupled to general relativity can become a tachyonic ghost at low energies around a background in which the scalar's gradient is spacelike. By performing a canonical transformation we…
We explore bosonic strings and Type II superstrings in the simplest time dependent backgrounds, namely orbifolds of Minkowski space by time reversal and some spatial reflections. We show that there are no negative norm physical excitations.…
In this essay I point out that, in the context of semi-classical gravity, the equivalence principle can mitigate the cosmological constant problem. On a Minkowski space-time background with the usual $\mathbb{R}^4$ topology, the vacuum…
We apply a very simple procedure to construct non-singular cosmological models for flat Friedmann universes filled with minimally coupled scalar fields or by tachyon Born-Infeld-type fields. Remarkably, for the minimally coupled scalar…
We devise a method to obtain a phantom version of FRW k-essence cosmologies with homogeneous k-fields by applying form-invariance transformations. It can be seen that the transformation performs the maps $H\toH$ and $\rho+p\to-(\rho+p)$,…
We present a thorough stability analysis of modified gravity theories in the presence of matter fields. We use the Effective Field Theory framework for Dark Energy and Modified Gravity to retain a general approach for the gravity sector and…
A class of dynamical dark energy models is constructed through an extended version of fermion fields corresponding to phantom dark ghost spinors, which are spin one half with mass dimension one. We find that if these spinors interact with…
Tachyon condensation in quantum field theory (QFT) plays a central role in models of fundamental interactions and cosmology. Inspired by tower truncation in string field theory, ultraviolet completions were proposed with infinite-derivative…
This paper deals with dark and phantom energy in the tachyon and sub-quantum models for dark energy. We obtain that the simplest condition for such a regime to occur in these scenarios is that the scalar field be Wick rotated to imaginary…
The rolling tachyon is a non-canonical scalar field model well motivated in string theory which naturally predicts variations of the fine-structure constant. Such variations can in principle lead to interesting observable consequences, but…
The aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
Weakly nonlocal (WNL) Quantum Field Theories (QFT's) may define a new class of UV-completions in particle physics and gravity, without introducing any new elementary particle. One problematic issue is how to realize spontaneous symmetry…
A tachyon is considered to be sick in the context of particle mechanics, but in field theory just indicates instability of a background. We consider a similar possibility that a ghost in field theory might be just an indication of…