Stability of Closed Timelike Curves in a Galileon Model

Abstract

Recently Burrage, de Rham, Heisenberg and Tolley have constructed eternal, classical solutions with closed timelike curves (CTCs) in a Galileon model coupled to an auxiliary scalar field. These theories contain at least two distinct metrics and, in configurations with CTCs, two distinct notions of locality. As usual, globally CTCs lead to pathologies including nonlocal constraints on the initial Cauchy data. Locally, with respect to the gravitational metric, we use a WKB approximation to explicitly construct small, short-wavelength perturbations without imposing the nonlocal constraints and observe that these perturbations do not grow and so do not lead to an instability.

10 pages, no figures