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Null energy condition and superluminal propagation

5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

5 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We study whether a violation of the null energy condition necessarily implies the presence of instabilities. We prove that this is the case in a large class of situations, including isotropic solids and fluids relevant for cosmology. On the other hand we present several counter-examples of consistent effective field theories possessing a stable background where the null energy condition is violated. Two necessary features of these counter-examples are the lack of isotropy of the background and the presence of superluminal modes. We argue that many of the properties of massive gravity can be understood by associating it to a solid at the edge of violating the null energy condition. We briefly analyze the difficulties of mimicking $\dot H>0$ in scalar tensor theories of gravity.

fields

gr-qc 4 hep-th 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 5

representative citing papers

Geodesic completion of big bangs from emergent geometry

gr-qc · 2026-02-25 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Phantom Chaplygin gas forces the Einstein-frame lapse to change sign smoothly while the causal-frame lapse stays positive, yielding a robust non-singular bounce even with extra matter.

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