Stability of massive cosmological gravitons

Deser, S.; Waldron, Andrew

doi:10.1016/s0370-2693(01)00523-8

Cited by 186 publications

(259 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Close to this limit, we cannot make any robust conclusions regarding stability from a perturbative analysis alone. This limit has qualitative similarities to the partially massless limit for massive gravity in de Sitter [35,36], aswell as the chiral limit of topologically massive gravity 5 in AdS [37,38], and the zero tension limit of DGP self-acceleration [31 -33]. In each case there is a ghost whose kinetic term seems to disappear [35,37,33] in the appropriate limit and a more careful analysis is required to identify any left over degrees of freedom.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…In each case there is a ghost whose kinetic term seems to disappear [35,37,33] in the appropriate limit and a more careful analysis is required to identify any left over degrees of freedom. For massive gravity in de Sitter, the dangerous mode genuinely disappears [36], whereas in the latter two cases the ghost mixes with another mode, such that one ghost-like degree of freedom remains [38,33]. We would need a direct analysis beyond the scope of this paper to see what happens in the exact Chern-Simons limit of EGB gravity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The instability of vacua in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

Charmousis

Padilla

2008

J. High Energy Phys.

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Owing to the quadratic nature of the theory, Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity generically permits two distinct vacuum solutions. One solution (the "Einstein" vacuum) has a well defined limit as the Gauss-Bonnet coupling goes to zero, whereas the other solution (the "stringy" vacuum) does not. There has been some debate regarding the stability of these vacua, most recently from Deser & Tekin who have argued that the corresponding black hole solutions have positive mass and as such both vacua are stable. Whilst the statement about the mass is correct, we argue that the stringy vacuum is still perturbatively unstable. Simply put, the stringy vacuum suffers from a ghost-like instability that is not excited by the spherically symmetric black hole, but would be excited by any source likely to emit gravitational waves, such as a binary system. This result is reliable except in the strongly coupled regime close to the Chern-Simons limit, when the two vacua are almost degenerate. In this regime, we study instanton transitions between branches via bubble nucleation, and calculate the nucleation probability. This demonstrates that there is large mixing between the vacua, so that neither of them can accurately describe the true quantum vacuum. We also present a new gravitational instanton describing black hole pair production in de Sitter space on the Einstein branch, which is preferred to the usual Nariai instantons and is not present in pure Einstein gravity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The instability of vacua in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

Charmousis

Padilla

2008

J. High Energy Phys.

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“…However the analysis of tachyonic instabilities in dS 4 is complicated by the fact that the naive Hamiltonian corresponding to the wave operator in (4) has an explicit time-dependence from f (t) and is therefore not conserved. The operator corresponding to the actual conserved energy is manifestly positive inside the de Sitter horizon for any m 2 > 0, as shown in [17]. This is referred to as a "mild" tachyonic instability in the last reference in [4]; for our purposes we will not call such modes tachyons, reserving that name for cases such as m 2 < 0 in (4) which resemble tachyons in flat space.…”

Section: A De Sitter Ghostsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Self-accelerating warped braneworlds

et al. 2007

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Braneworld models with induced gravity have the potential to replace dark energy as the explanation for the current accelerating expansion of the Universe. The original model of Dvali, Gabadadze and Porrati (DGP) demonstrated the existence of a "self-accelerating" branch of background solutions, but suffered from the presence of ghosts. We present a new large class of braneworld models which generalize the DGP model. Our models have negative curvature in the bulk, allow a second brane, and have general brane tensions and localized curvature terms. We exhibit three different kinds of ghosts, associated to the graviton zero mode, the radion, and the longitudinal components of massive graviton modes. The latter two species occur in the DGP model, for negative and positive brane tension respectively. In our models, we find that the two kinds of DGP ghosts are tightly correlated with each other, but are not always linked to the feature of self-acceleration. Our models are a promising laboratory for understanding the origins and physical meaning of braneworld ghosts, and perhaps for eliminating them altogether.

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“…FRW reference metric: The quadratic action (2.2) is also known to be free of the Boulware-Deser ghost instability when f µν is a de Sitter or anti de Sitter metric [15,16,17,18], or more generally, an FRW [19,20,21] metric 1 . However, consistent non-linear extensions of such quadratic actions had so far remained undetermined.…”

Section: General Structure Of Non-linear Massive Gravitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghost-free massive gravity with a general reference metric

Hassan

Rosen

Schmidt-May

2012

J. High Energ. Phys.

435

527

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Theories of massive gravity inevitably include an auxiliary reference metric. Generically, they also contain an inconsistency known as the Boulware-Deser ghost. Recently, a family of non-linear massive gravity actions, formulated with a flat reference metric, were proposed and shown to be ghost free at the complete non-linear level. In this paper we consider these non-linear massive gravity actions but now formulated with a general reference metric. We extend the proof of the absence of the Boulware-Deser ghost to this case. The analysis is carried out in the ADM formalism at the complete non-linear level. We show that in these models there always exists a Hamiltonian constraint which, with an associated secondary constraint, eliminates the ghost. This result considerably extends the range of known consistent non-linear massive gravity theories. In addition, these theories can also be used to describe a massive spin-2 field in an arbitrary, fixed gravitational background. We also discuss the positivity of the Hamiltonian.

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Stability of massive cosmological gravitons

Cited by 186 publications

References 14 publications

The instability of vacua in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

The instability of vacua in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

Self-accelerating warped braneworlds

Ghost-free massive gravity with a general reference metric

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