arXiv subjects

Thomas P. Sotiriou

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas P. Sotiriou.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Spontaneous scalarization of black holes and compact stars from a Gauss-Bonnet coupling

We identify a class of scalar-tensor theories with coupling between the scalar and the Gauss-Bonnet invariant that exhibit spontaneous scalarization for both black holes and compact stars. In particular, these theories formally admit all of the stationary solutions of general relativity, but these are not dynamically preferred if certain conditions are satisfied. Remarkably, black holes exhibit scalarization if their mass lies within one of many narrow bands. We find evidence that scalarization can occur in neutron stars as well.

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arXiv2018

Constructing Neutron Stars with a Gravitational Higgs Mechanism

In scalar-tensor theories, spontaneous scalarization is a phase transition that can occur in ultra-dense environments such as neutron stars. The scalar field develops a non-trivial configuration once the stars exceeds a compactness threshold. We recently pointed out that, if the scalar exhibits some additional coupling to matter, it could give rise to significantly different microphysics in these environments. In this work we study, at the non-perturbative level, a toy model in which the photon is given a large mass when spontaneous scalarization occurs. Our results demonstrate clearly the effectiveness of spontaneous scalarization as a Higgs-like mechanism in neutron stars.

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arXiv2018

Hořava Gravity after GW170817

The recent detection of gravitational wave GW170817 has placed a severe bound on the deviation of the speed of gravitational waves from the speed of light. We explore the consequences of this detection for Horava gravity.

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arXiv2018

Detecting Lorentz Violations with Gravitational Waves from Black Hole Binaries

Gravitational wave observations have been used to test Lorentz symmetry by looking for dispersive effects that are caused by higher order corrections to the dispersion relation. In this Letter I argue on general grounds that, when such corrections are present, there will also be a scalar excitation. Hence, a smoking-gun observation of Lorentz symmetry breaking would be the direct detection of scalar waves that travel at a speed other than the speed of the standard gravitational wave polarisations or the speed of light. Interestingly, in known Lorentz-breaking gravity theories the difference between the speeds of scalar and tensor waves is virtually unconstrained, whereas the difference between the latter and the speed of light is already severely constrained by the coincident detection of gravitational waves and gamma rays from a binary neutron star merger.

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arXiv2017

Black hole horizons at the extremal limit in Lorentz-violating gravity

Lorentz-violating gravity theories with a preferred foliation can have instantaneous propagation. Nonetheless, it has been shown that black holes can still exist in such theories and the relevant notion of an event horizon has been dubbed `universal horizon'. In stationary spacetimes the universal horizon has to reside in a region of spacetime where the Killing vector associated with stationarity is spacelike. This raises the question of what happens to the universal horizon in the extremal limit, where no such region exists anymore. We use a decoupling limit approximation to study this problem. Our results suggest that at the extremal limit, the extremal Killing horizon appears to play the role of a degenerate universal horizon, despite being a null and not a spacelike surface, and hence not a leaf of the preferred foliation.

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arXiv2016

Causality and black holes in spacetimes with a preferred foliation

We develop a framework that facilitates the study of the causal structure of spacetimes with a causally preferred foliation. Such spacetimes may arise as solutions of Lorentz-violating theories, e.g. Horava gravity. Our framework allows us to rigorously define concepts such as black/white holes and to formalize the notion of a `universal horizon', that has been previously introduced in the simpler setting of static and spherically symmetric geometries. We also touch upon the issue of development and prove that universal horizons are Cauchy horizons when evolution depends on boundary data or asymptotic conditions. We establish a local characterisation of universal horizons in stationary configurations. Finally, under the additional assumption of axisymmetry, we examine under which conditions these horizons are cloaked by Killing horizons, which can act like usual event horizons for low-energy excitations.

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arXiv2016

Extrinsic curvature in 2-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulation

Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) is a non-perturbative quantisation of general relativity. Hořava-Lifshitz gravity on the other hand modifies general relativity to allow for perturbative quan- tisation. Past work has given rise to the speculation that Hořava-Lifshitz gravity might correspond to the continuum limit of CDT. In this paper we add another piece to this puzzle by applying the CDT quantisation prescription directly to Hořava-Lifshitz gravity in 2 dimensions. We derive the continuum Hamiltonian and we show that it matches exactly the Hamiltonian one derives from canonically quantising the Hořava-Lifshitz action. Unlike the standard CDT case, here the intro- duction of a foliated lattice does not impose further restriction on the configuration space and, as a result, lattice quantisation does not leave any imprint on continuum physics as expected.

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arXiv2016

Gravitational Higgs Mechanism in Neutron Star Interiors

We suggest that nonminimally coupled scalar fields can lead to modifications of the microphysics in the interiors of relativistic stars. As a concrete example, we consider the generation of a non-zero photon mass in such high-density environments. This is achieved by means of a light gravitational scalar, and the scalarization phase transition in scalar-tensor theories of gravitation. Two distinct models are presented, and phenomenological implications are briefly discussed.

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arXiv2016

Jeans' Ghost

We show that a massless canonical scalar field minimally coupled to general relativity can become a tachyonic ghost at low energies around a background in which the scalar's gradient is spacelike. By performing a canonical transformation we demonstrate that this low energy ghost can be recast, at the level of the action, in a form of a fluid that undergoes a Jeans-like instability affecting only modes with large wavelength. This illustrates that low-energy tachyonic ghosts do not lead to a catastrophic quantum vacuum instability, unlike the usual high-energy ghost degrees of freedom.

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arXiv2016

The uninvited guest in mixed derivative Hořava Gravity

We revisit the mixed derivative extension of Hořava gravity which was designed to address the naturalness problems of the standard theory in the presence of matter couplings. We consider the minimal theory with mixed derivative terms that contain two spatial and two temporal derivatives. Including all terms compatible with the (modified) scaling rules and the foliation preserving diffeomorphisms, we calculate the dispersion relations of propagating modes. We find that the theory contains four propagating degrees of freedom, as opposed to three in the standard Hořava gravity. The new degree of freedom is another scalar graviton and it is unstable at low energies. Our result brings tension to the Lorentz violation suppression mechanism that relies on separation of scales.

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arXiv2016

Evolution and spherical collapse in Einstein-aether theory and Horava gravity

We compare the initial value formulation of the low-energy limit of (non-projectable) Horava gravity to that of Einstein-aether theory when the aether is assumed to be hypersurface orthogonal at the level of the field equations. This comparison clearly highlights a crucial difference in the causal structure of the two theories at the non-perturbative level: in Horava gravity evolution equations include an elliptic equation that is not a constraint relating initial data but needs to be imposed on each slice of the foliation. This feature is absent in Einstein-aether theory. We discuss its physical significance in Horava gravity. We also focus on spherical symmetry and we revisit existing collapse simulations in Einstein-aether theory. We argue that they have likely already uncovered the dynamical formation of a universal horizon and that they can act as evidence that this horizon is indeed a Cauchy horizon in Horava gravity.

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arXiv2016

Slowly rotating black holes in Einstein-æther theory

We study slowly rotating, asymptotically flat black holes in Einstein-aether theory and show that solutions that are free from naked finite area singularities form a two-parameter family. These parameters can be thought of as the mass and angular momentum of the black hole, while there are no independent aether charges. We also show that the aether has non-vanishing vorticity throughout the spacetime, as a result of which there is no hypersurface that resembles the universal horizon found in static, spherically symmetric solutions. Moreover, for experimentally viable choices of the coupling constants, the frame-dragging potential of our solutions only shows percent-level deviations from the corresponding quantities in General Relativity and Horava gravity. Finally, we uncover and discuss several subtleties in the correspondence between Einstein-aether theory and Horava gravity solutions in the $c_ω\to\infty$ limit.

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arXiv2015

Horava Gravity with Mixed Derivative Terms: Power-Counting Renormalizability with Lower-Order Dispersions

It has been argued that Horava gravity needs to be extended to include terms that mix spatial and time derivatives in order avoid unacceptable violations of Lorentz invariance in the matter sector. In an earlier paper we have shown that including such mixed derivative terms generically leads to 4th instead of 6th order dispersion relations and this could be (naively) interpreted as a threat to renormalizability. We have also argued that power-counting renormalizability is not actually compromised, but instead the simplest power-counting renormalizable model is not unitary. In this paper we consider the Lifshitz scalar as a toy theory and we generalize our analysis to include higher order operators. We show that models which are power-counting renormalizable and unitary do exist. Our results suggest the existence of a new class of theories that can be thought of as Horava gravity with mixed derivative terms.

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arXiv2015

Geodesic properties in terms of multipole moments in scalar-tensor theories of gravity

The formalism for describing a metric and the corresponding scalar in terms of multipole moments has recently been developed for scalar-tensor theories. We take advantage of this formalism in order to obtain expressions for the observables that characterise geodesics in terms of the moments. These expressions provide some insight into how the structure of a scalarized compact object affects observables. They can also be used to understand how deviations from general relativity are imprinted on the observables.

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arXiv2015

Black Holes and Scalar Fields

No-hair theorems in theories of gravity with a scalar field are briefly and critically reviewed. Their significance and limitations are discussed and potential evasions are considered.

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arXiv2015

Multipole moments in scalar-tensor theory of gravity

Stationary, asymptotically flat spacetimes in general relativity can be characterized by their multipole moments. The moments have proved to be very useful tools for extracting information about the spacetime from various observables and, more recently, for establishing universalities in the structure of neutron stars. As a first step toward extending these methods beyond general relativity, we develop the formalism that allows one to define and calculate the multipole moments in scalar-tensor theories of gravity.

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arXiv2014

Black hole hair in generalized scalar-tensor gravity: An explicit example

In a recent Letter we have shown that in shift-symmetric Horndeski theory the scalar field is forced to obtain a nontrivial configuration in black hole spacetimes, unless a linear coupling with the Gauss-Bonnet invariant is tuned away. As a result, black holes generically have hair in this theory. In this companion paper, we first review our argument and discuss it in more detail. We then present actual black hole solutions in the simplest case of a theory with the linear scalar-Gauss-Bonnet coupling. We generate exact solutions numerically for a wide range of values of the coupling and also construct analytic solutions perturbatively in the small coupling limit. Comparison of the two types of solutions indicates that non-linear effects that are not captured by the perturbative solution lead to a finite area, as opposed to a central, singularity. Remarkably, black holes have a minimum size, controlled by the length scale associated with the scalar-Gauss-Bonnet coupling. We also compute some phenomenological observables for the numerical solution for a wide range of values of the scalar-Gauss-Bonnet coupling. Deviations from the Schwarzschild geometry are generically very small.

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arXiv2014

Horava gravity with mixed derivative terms

Horava gravity has been constructed so as to exhibit anisotropic scaling in the ultraviolet, as this renders the theory power-counting renormalizable. However, when coupled to matter, the theory has been shown to suffer from quadratic divergences. A way to cure these divergences is to add terms with both time and space derivatives. We consider this extended version of the theory in detail. We perform a perturbative analysis that includes all modes, determine the propagators and discuss how including mixed-derivative terms affects them. We also consider the Lifshitz scalar with mixed-derivative terms as a toy model for power counting arguments and discuss the influence of such terms on renormalizability.

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