arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Andrew Tolley.
We summarize recent progress in the development, application, and understanding of effective field theories and highlight promising directions for future research. This Report is prepared as the TF02 "Effective Field Theory" topical group summary for the Theory Frontier as part of the Snowmass 2021 process.
The discovery of cosmic acceleration has stimulated theorists to consider dark energy or modifications to Einstein's General Relativity as possible explanations. The last decade has seen advances in theories that go beyond smooth dark energy -- modified gravity and interactions of dark energy. While the theoretical terrain is being actively explored, the generic presence of fifth forces and dark sector couplings suggests a set of distinct observational signatures. This report focuses on observations that differ from the conventional probes that map the expansion history or large-scale structure. Examples of such novel probes are: detection of scalar fields via lab experiments, tests of modified gravity using stars and galaxies in the nearby universe, comparison of lensing and dynamical masses of galaxies and clusters, and the measurements of fundamental constants at high redshift. The observational expertise involved is very broad as it spans laboratory experiments, high resolution astronomical imaging and spectroscopy and radio observations. In the coming decade, searches for these effects have the potential for discovering fundamental new physics. We discuss how the searches can be carried out using experiments that are already under way or with modest adaptations of existing telescopes or planned experiments. The accompanying paper on the Growth of Cosmic Structure describes complementary tests of gravity with observations of large-scale structure.
Massive Gravity in four dimensions has been shown to be free of the Boulware-Deser (BD) ghost in the ADM language for a specific choice of mass terms. We show here how this is consistent with the Stückelberg language beyond the decoupling limit, and how the constraint required to remove the BD ghost arises in this framework nonperturbatively, without the use of field redefinitions. We emphasize a subtlety in obtaining this constraint, that has been overlooked in previous literature. In both the ADM and Stückelberg formalisms the vanishing of the determinant of a Hessian guarantees the absence of the BD ghost.