Effective phantom dark energy is a background-level reconstruction that does not imply fundamental pathologies such as ghost instabilities or null energy condition violation by the underlying stress tensor.
Living with ghosts in Lorentz invariant theories
1 Pith paper cite this work, alongside 25 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
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 mediated by non-derivative interactions, showing that this is finite and logarithmically growing in time. For D > 2, the decay rate is divergent unless we assume that the interaction between ordinary matter and the ghost sector is soft in the UV, so that it can be described in terms of non-local form factors rather than point-like vertices. We provide an example of a nonlocal gravitational-strength interaction between the two sectors, which appears to satisfy all observational constraints.
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Effective Phantom Dark Energy: What Cosmological Reconstruction Does and Does Not Imply
Effective phantom dark energy is a background-level reconstruction that does not imply fundamental pathologies such as ghost instabilities or null energy condition violation by the underlying stress tensor.