Massive Galileons and Vainshtein Screening

TL;DR

This paper investigates massive Galileon theories with Vainshtein screening, revealing that UV completions can disrupt screening and emphasizing the importance of careful operator consideration in effective theories.

Contribution

It identifies specific massive Galileon models exhibiting Vainshtein screening and analyzes how UV completions affect the screening mechanism.

Findings

Vainshtein screening can be broken by UV operators.

Neglecting operators during integration out is non-trivial.

Careful analysis is required to maintain screening in effective theories.

Abstract

The Vainshtein screening mechanism relies on nonlinear interaction terms becoming dominant close to a compact source. However, theories displaying this mechanism are generally understood to be low-energy theories: it is unclear that operators emerging from UV completion do not interfere with terms inducing Vainshtein screening. In this work, we find a set of interacting massive Galileon theories that exhibit Vainshtein screening; examining potential UV completions of these theories, we determine that the screening does not survive the extension. We find that neglecting operators when integrating out a heavy field is non-trivial, and either care must be taken to ensure that omitted terms are small for the whole domain, or one is forced to work solely with the UV theory. We also comment on massive deformations of the familiar Wess-Zumino Galileons.