Low energy ghosts and the Jeans’ instability
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 demonstrate that this low energy ghost can be recast, at th...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
American Physical Society
2016
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39500/ |
| Summary: | 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 demonstrate that this low energy ghost can be recast, at the level of the action, in a form of a fluid that undergoes a Jeans-like instability affecting only modes with large wavelength. This illustrates that low energy tachyonic ghosts do not lead to a catastrophic quantum vacuum instability, unlike the usual high-energy ghost degrees of freedom. |
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