Showing papers by "Enrico Trincherini published in 2009"

Galileon as a local modification of gravity

Abstract: In the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) model, the "self-accelerating" solution is plagued by a ghost instability, which makes the solution untenable. This fact, as well as all interesting departures from general relativity (GR), are fully captured by a four-dimensional effective Lagrangian, valid at distances smaller than the present Hubble scale. The 4D effective theory involves a relativistic scalar pi, universally coupled to matter and with peculiar derivative self-interactions. In this paper, we study the connection between self-acceleration and the presence of ghosts for a quite generic class of theories that modify gravity in the infrared. These theories are defined as those that at distances shorter than cosmological, reduce to a certain generalization of the DGP 4D effective theory. We argue that for infrared modifications of GR locally due to a universally coupled scalar, our generalization is the only one that allows for a robust implementation of the Vainshtein effect-the decoupling of the scalar from matter in gravitationally bound systems-necessary to recover agreement with solar-system tests. Our generalization involves an internal Galilean invariance, under which pi's gradient shifts by a constant. This symmetry constrains the structure of the pi Lagrangian so much so that in 4D there exist only five terms that can yield sizable nonlinearities without introducing ghosts. We show that for such theories in fact there are "self-accelerating" de Sitter solutions with no ghostlike instabilities. In the presence of compact sources, these solutions can support spherically symmetric, Vainshtein-like nonlinear perturbations that are also stable against small fluctuations. We investigate a possible infrared completion of these theories at scales of order of the Hubble horizon, and larger. There are however some features of our theories that may constitute a problem at the theoretical or phenomenological level: the presence of superluminal excitations; the extreme subluminality of other excitations, which makes the quasistatic approximation for certain solar-system observables unreliable due to Cherenkov emission; the very low strong-interaction scale for pi pi scatterings.

Composite Vectors at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract: An unspecified strong dynamics may give rise to composite vectors sufficiently light that their interactions, among themselves or with the electroweak gauge bosons, be approximately described by an effective Lagrangian invariant under $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R/ SU(2)_{L+R}$. We study the production at the LHC of two such states by vector boson fusion or by the Drell--Yan process in this general framework and we compare it with the case of gauge vectors from a $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R\times SU(2)^N$ gauge model spontaneously broken to the diagonal SU(2) subgroup by a generic $\sigma$-model. Special attention is payed to the asymptotic behaviour of the different amplitudes in both cases. The expected rates of multi-lepton events from the decay of the composite vectors are also given. A thorough phenomenological analysis and the evaluation of the backgrounds to such signals, aiming at assessing the visibility of composite-vector pairs at the LHC, is instead deferred to future work.

Energy's and amplitudes' positivity

Abstract: In QFT, the null energy condition (NEC) for a classical field configuration is usually associated with that configuration's stability against small perturbations, and with the sub-luminality of these. Here, we exhibit an effective field theory that allows for stable NEC-violating solutions with exactly luminal excitations only. The model is the recently introduced `galileon', or more precisely its conformally invariant version. We show that the theory's low-energy S-matrix obeys standard positivity as implied by dispersion relations. However we also show that if the relevant NEC-violating solution is inside the effective theory, then other (generic) solutions allow for superluminal signal propagation. While the usual association between sub-luminality and positivity is not obeyed by our example, that between NEC and sub-luminality is, albeit in a less direct way than usual.