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Jeans' Ghost

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arxiv 1606.00618 v1 pith:BDAOXPVS submitted 2016-06-02 hep-th gr-qc

Jeans' Ghost

classification hep-th gr-qc
keywords ghostcanonicalinstabilityscalartachyonicactionaffectingaround
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. A no-go theorem in bumblebee vector-tensor cosmology

    hep-th 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0

    Bumblebee gravity with non-minimal couplings is healthy only under the degeneracy σ=-ξ/2, which fixes the potential and yields a stealth de Sitter solution with scalar sound speed squared ≈1/6.