A Well-Posed UV Completion for Simulating Scalar Galileons

Abstract

The Galileon scalar field theory is a prototypical example of an effective field theory that exhibits the Vainshtein screening mechanism, which is incorporated into many extensions to Einstein gravity. The Galileon describes the helicity zero mode of gravitational radiation, the presence of which has significant implications for predictions of gravitational waves from orbiting objects, and for tests of gravity sensitive to additional polarizations. Because of the derivative nature of their interactions, Galileons are superficially not well-posed as effective field theories. Although this property is properly understood merely as an artifact of the effective field theory truncation, and is not theoretically worrisome, at the practical level it nevertheless renders numerical simulation highly problematic. Notwithstanding, previous numerical approaches have successfully evolved the system for reasonable initial data by slowly turning on the interactions. We present here two alternative approaches to improving numerical stability in Galileon numerical simulations. One of these is a minor modification of previous approaches, which introduces a low pass filter that amounts to imposing a UV cutoff together with a relaxation method of turning on interactions. The second approach amounts to constructing a (numerical) UV completion for which the dynamics of the high momentum modes is under control, and for which it is unnecessary to slowly turn on nonlinear interactions. We show that numerical simulations of the UV theory successfully reproduce the correct Galileon dynamics at low energies, consistent with the low-pass filter method and with previous numerical simulations.