Pervasiveness of the breakdown of self-interacting vector field theories
Publication Date
2023
Advisor
Institution Author
Coates, Andrew
Ramazanoğlu, Fethi Mübin
Co-Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher:
American Physical Society
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Various groups recently argued that self-interacting vector field theories lack a well-defined time evolution when the field grows to large amplitudes, which has drastic consequences for models in gravity and high energy theory. Such field amplitudes can be a result of an external driving mechanism, or occur intrinsically, due to large values of the field and its derivatives in the initial data. This brings a natural question: Is small amplitude initial data guaranteed to evolve indefinitely in these theories in the absence of an outside driving term? We answer this question in the negative, demonstrating that arbitrarily low amplitude initial data can still lead to the breakdown of the theory. Namely, ingoing spherically symmetric wave packets in more than one spatial dimensions grow as an inverse power of the radius, and their amplitudes can generically reach high enough values where time evolution ceases to exist. This simple example further establishes the pervasiveness of the pathology of self-interacting vector field theories.
Description
Subject
Astronomy and astrophysics, Physics, particles and fields