Perturbative unitarity and NEC violation in genesis cosmology

Yong Cai (School of Physics and Microelectronics, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, 450001, China) ; Ji Xu (School of Physics and Microelectronics, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, 450001, China) ; Shuai Zhao (Department of Physics, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, 23529, USA; Theory Center, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Newport News, Virginia, 23606, USA) ; Siyi Zhou (Department of Physics, Kobe University, Kobe, 657-8501, Japan)

Explorations of the violation of null energy condition (NEC) in cosmology could enrich our understanding of the very early universe and the related gravity theories. Although a fully stable NEC violation can be realized in the “beyond Horndeski” theory, it remains an open question whether a violation of the NEC is allowed by some fundamental properties of UV-complete theories or the consistency requirements of effective field theory (EFT). We investigate the tree-level perturbative unitarity for stable NEC violations in the contexts of both Galileon and “beyond Horndeski” genesis cosmology, in which the universe is asymptotically Minkowskian in the past. We find that the constraints of perturbative unitarity imply that we may need some unknown new physics below the cut-off scale of the EFT other than that represented by the “beyond Horndeski” operators.

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      "value": "Explorations of the violation of null energy condition (NEC) in cosmology could enrich our understanding of the very early universe and the related gravity theories. Although a fully stable NEC violation can be realized in the \u201cbeyond Horndeski\u201d theory, it remains an open question whether a violation of the NEC is allowed by some fundamental properties of UV-complete theories or the consistency requirements of effective field theory (EFT). We investigate the tree-level perturbative unitarity for stable NEC violations in the contexts of both Galileon and \u201cbeyond Horndeski\u201d genesis cosmology, in which the universe is asymptotically Minkowskian in the past. We find that the constraints of perturbative unitarity imply that we may need some unknown new physics below the cut-off scale of the EFT other than that represented by the \u201cbeyond Horndeski\u201d operators."
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Published on:
20 October 2022
Publisher:
Springer
Published in:
Journal of High Energy Physics , Volume 2022 (2022)
Issue 10
Pages 1-28
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2022)140
arXiv:
2207.11772
Copyrights:
The Author(s)
Licence:
CC-BY-4.0

Fulltext files: