Dirac-Born-Infeld Genesis: An Improved Violation of the Null Energy Condition

Abstract

We show that the Dirac-Born-Infeld conformal galileons, derived from the world-volume theory of a 3-brane moving in an anti-de Sitter bulk, admit a background, stable under quantum corrections, which violates the null energy condition. The perturbations around this background are stable and propagate subluminally. Unlike other known examples of null energy condition violation, such as ghost condensation and conformal galileons, this theory also admits a stable, Poincaré-invariant vacuum. The 2 → 2 amplitude satisfies standard analyticity conditions. The full S matrix is likely not analytic, however, since perturbations around deformations of the Poincaré invariant vacuum propagate superluminally.