High Energy Theory Seminar

I will discuss some surprising features of vector Bosons in de Sitter space which appear when they are studied with respect to a fixed static patch frame. We will find that this field theory appears to be controlled by an effective physical mass mphys which differs from the naive "Lagrangian" mass m which appears in the usual form of the Proca Lagrangian/action. We will argue that this theory remains well-defined in the naively tachyonic Lagrangian mass range m2 < 0 up to a certain negative value (corresponding to mphys = 0) which we call the "edge of stability", at which several interesting features emerge. Fixing a static patch frame breaks the de Sitter isometries down to a "static patch subgroup", explaining how our theory may continue to be well-defined when m2 < 0 despite not fitting into a unitary irreducible representation of SO(D,1).

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom information.