Instability of vectorized stars

Abstract

In recent papers it has been shown that a large class of vectorization mechanisms in gravity, which involve the vector fields becoming apparently tachyonic in some regime, are actually dominated by ghosts and nonperturbative behavior. Despite this, vectorized compact object solutions have previously been found, which raises the question of how, and if, the newly discovered ghosts are quenched in these cases. Here we develop the tools to study the perturbations of vectorized compact objects, and demonstrate that they suffer from ghosts and gradient instabilities as well. Thus, these vectorized objects do not represent the stable end point of a quenched instability unlike their scalarized counterparts in the spontaneous scalarization literature.