Instability by Chern-Simons and/or Transgressions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability bounds of five-dimensional gravity theories with Chern-Simons and transgression terms, extending previous results and confirming stability conditions for supergravity vacua.

Contribution

It generalizes stability bounds for a broad class of gravity theories involving Chern-Simons and transgression terms, including supergravity models.

Findings

Derived upper bounds for stability in generalized gravity theories.

Confirmed that supergravity AdS x Sphere vacua satisfy these bounds.

Extended previous stability results to more general theories.

Abstract

It was demonstrated recently that there is an upper bound of the Chern-Simons coupling of the five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory, beyond which the electrically charged AdS_2 \times S^3 vacuum solution becomes unstable. We generalize the result to a general class of gravity theories involving Chern-Simons and/or transgression terms and find their upper bounds for stability. We show that supergravities with AdS \times Sphere vacua satisfy the bounds.