Potentially healthy time evolution in interacting $p$-form fields

Abstract

It was recently discovered that many self-interacting vector fields can have healthy time evolution when field amplitudes are small, however, further dynamics becomes impossible if the norm of the field reaches a certain finite value. This result was also generalized to higher form fields using the fact that vector fields can also be viewed as 1-form fields. However, other recent work demonstrated that some exceptional vector field theories do not suffer from such problems if the self-interaction term is chosen in a specific way. Here, we study whether a similar exception exists for $p$-form fields in general. We show that, in 4 spacetime dimensions, 3-form fields with self interaction can indeed have healthy time evolution similarly to vectors. However, the analogous coupling terms still lead to loss of hyperbolicity for 2-form fields. We study the reasons for these differences, and comment on directions to generalize our findings. We also demonstrate that eliminating the mass term, one of the proposals to build healthy self-interacting vector field theories, moves the singularity to other parts of the equations of motion, hence, most likely does not provide well-posed time evolution.