2022/06/28 by Katsuki Aoki, Aoki, Katsuki, Masato Minamitsuji +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.14320
openalex publication_date 2022/06/28 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has been argued that a self-interacting massive vector field is pathological due to a dynamical formation of a singular effective metric of the vector field, which is the onset of a gradient or ghost instability. We discuss that this singularity formation is not necessarily a fundamental problem but a breakdown of the effective field theory (EFT) description of the massive vector field. By using a model of ultraviolet (UV) completion of the massive vector field, we demonstrate that a Proca star, a self-gravitating condensate of the vector field, continues to exist even after the EFT suffers from a gradient instability without any pathology at UV, in which the EFT description is still valid and the gradient instability in EFT may be interpreted as a standard dynamical instability of a high-density boson star from the UV perspective. On the other hand, we find that the EFT description is broken before the ghost instability appears. This suggests that a heavy degree of freedom may be spontaneously excited to cure the pathology of the EFT as the EFT dynamically tends to approach the onset of the ghost instability.