Spontaneous violation of the energy conditions

Abstract

A decade ago, it was shown that a wide class of scalar-tensor theories can pass very restrictive weak field tests of gravity and yet exhibit non-perturbative strong field deviations away from General Relativity. This phenomenon was called `Spontaneous Scalarization' and causes the (Einstein frame) scalar field inside a neutron star to rapidly become inhomogeneous once the star's mass increases above some critical value. For a star whose mass is below the threshold, the field is instead nearly uniform (a state which minimises the star's energy) and the configuration is similar to the General Relativity one. Here, we show that the spontaneous scalarization phenomenon is linked to another strong field effect: a spontaneous violation of the weak energy condition.

10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Energy Conditions in $f(Q)$ gravity
• Spontaneous scalarization
• Constraining $f(Q,T)$ gravity from energy conditions
• Semi-Analytic Stellar Structure in Scalar-Tensor Gravity
• Wormholes in vacuum Brans-Dicke theory
• Scalarization-like mechanism through spacetime anisotropic scaling symmetry
• The violation of the weak energy condition, Is it generic of spontaneous scalarization ?
• A complete study of conformally flat pseudo-symmetric spacetimes in the theory of F(R)-gravity
• Spontaneous Scalarization in Proto-neutron Stars
• Cosmology and Static Spherically Symmetric solutions in D-dimensional Scalar Tensor Theories: Some Novel Features