Related papers: Phantom without UV pathology
The positive energy theorem precludes the possibility of Minkowski flat space decaying by any mechanism. In certain circumstances, however, large quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field could arise---not only at the Planck scale,…
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…
We argue that theories with ghosts may have a long lived vacuum state even if all interactions are Lorentz preserving. In space-time dimension D = 2, we consider the tree level decay rate of the vacuum into ghosts and ordinary particles…
In the framework of the concordance cosmological model the first-order scalar and vector perturbations of the homogeneous background are derived in the weak gravitational field limit without any supplementary approximations. The sources of…
If Lorentz symmetry is broken, it must have occurred dynamically, via a vector or tensor field whose potential energy forces it to take on a non-zero background expectation value "in vacuum". If the set of minima of this potential (the…
In this paper, we investigate three important issues: stability, ghost and strong coupling, in the Horava-Melby-Thompson setup of the Horava-Lifshitz theory with $\lambda \not= 1$, generalized recently by da Silva. We first develop the…
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
A self consistent effective field theory of modified gravity has recently been proposed with spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. The symmetry is broken by a vector field with the wrong-sign mass term and it has been shown to…
We consider linear perturbations about a homogeneous and isotropic cosmological background in the projectable version of Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. Starting from the action for cosmological perturbations, we identify the canonically…
Despite the success of Maxwell's electromagnetism in the description of the electromagnetic interactions on small scales, we know very little about the behaviour of electromagnetic fields on cosmological distances. Thus, it has been…
Particle production in the background of an external classical oscillating field is a key process describing the stage of preheating after inflation. For sufficiently strong couplings between the inflaton and matter fields, this process is…
We exhibit a class of effective field theories that have hierarchically small Wilson coefficients for operators that are not protected by symmetries but are not finely tuned. These theories possess bounded target spaces and vacua that break…
The existence of instantonic decay modes would indicate a semi-classical instability of the vacua of ten and eleven dimensional supergravity theories. Decay modes whose spin structures are incompatible with those of supersymmetric vacua…
The problem of matching different regions of spacetime in order to construct inhomogeneous cosmological models is investigated in the context of Lagrangian theories of gravity constructed from general analytic functions f(R), and from…
A new version of nonsymmetric gravitational theory is presented. The field equations are expanded about the Minkowski metric, giving in lowest order the linear Einstein field equations and massive Proca field equations for the antisymmetric…
The background evolution of an accelerated, dark energy dominated universe is aptly described by non-canonical tachyon scalar field models. The accelerated expansion of the universe is determined by the choice of a suitable scalar field…
We construct a supersymmetric (1+1)-dimensional field theory involving extra derivatives and associated ghosts: the spectrum of the Hamiltonian is not bounded from below, neither from above. In spite of that, there is neither classical, nor…
It has been recently shown that tachyonic chameleon model of dark energy in which tachyon scalar field non-minimally coupled to the matter admits stable scaling attractor solution that could give rise to the late-time accelerated expansion…
Many cosmological scenarios envisage either a bounce of the universe at early times, or collapse of matter locally to form a black hole which re-expands into a new expanding universe region. Energy conditions preclude this happening for…
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…