Living with ghosts in Horava-Lifshitz gravity · arXivDesk
1601.05405Jan 20, 201633 pages, 1 figure. The proof of an equivalence between the IR limit of the projectable Horava-Lifshitz gravity and the mimetic matter scenario is given in Appendix A. Version accepted for publication in JHEP
Living with ghosts in Horava-Lifshitz gravity
S. Ramazanov, F. Arroja, M. Celoria, S. Matarrese, L. Pilo
We consider the branch of the projectable Horava-Lifshitz model which exhibits ghost instabilities in the low energy limit. It turns out that, due to the Lorentz violating structure of the model and to the presence of a finite strong coupling scale, the vacuum decay rate into photons is tiny in a wide range of phenomenologically acceptable parameters. The strong coupling scale, understood as a cutoff on ghosts' spatial momenta, can be raised up to Λ∼10 TeV. At lower momenta, the projectable Horava-Lifshitz gravity is equivalent to General Relativity supplemented by a fluid with a small positive sound speed squared (10−42≲) cs2≲10−20
Nearby in the stack
, that could be a promising candidate for the Dark Matter. Despite these advantages, the unavoidable presence of the strong coupling obscures the implementation of the original Horava's proposal on quantum gravity. Apart from the Horava-Lifshitz model, conclusions of the present work hold also for the mimetic matter scenario, where the analogue of the projectability condition is achieved by a non-invertible conformal transformation of the metric.