Imperial College London
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Claudia de Rham

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Professor of Theoretical Physics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

c.de-rham CV

 
 
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Location

 

H506Huxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Chen:2022:10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025,
author = {Chen, CY-R and de, Rham C and Margalit, A and Tolley, AJ},
doi = {10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025},
journal = {The Journal of High Energy Physics},
pages = {1--40},
title = {A cautionary case of casual causality},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025},
volume = {25},
year = {2022}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - We distinguish between the notions of asymptotic causality and infrared causality for gravitational effective field theories, and show that the latter gives constraints consistent with gravitational positivity bounds. We re-explore the scattering of gravitational waves in a spherically symmetric background in the EFT of gravity in D ≥ 5, for which the leading-order correction to Einstein gravity is determined by the Gauss-Bonnet operator. We reproduce the known result that the truncated effective theory exhibits apparent time advances relative to the background geometry for specific polarisations, which naively signal a violation of causality. We show that by properly identifying the regime of validity of the effective theory, the apparent time advance can be shown to be unresolvable. To illustrate this, we identify specific higher-dimension operators in the EFT expansion which become large for potentially resolvable time advances, rendering the EFT expansion invalid. Our results demonstrate how staying within the confines of the EFT, neither infrared nor asymptotic causality are ever violated for Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, no matter how low the scale, and furthermore its causality can be understood without appealing to a precise UV completion such as string theory.
AU  - Chen,CY-R
AU  - de,Rham C
AU  - Margalit,A
AU  - Tolley,AJ
DO  - 10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025
EP  - 40
PY  - 2022///
SN  - 1029-8479
SP  - 1
TI  - A cautionary case of casual causality
T2  - The Journal of High Energy Physics
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025
UR  - https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000764701100002&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP03(2022)025
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/104151
VL  - 25
ER  -
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