Regular Geometries from Singular Matter in Quasi-Topological Gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how coupling matter to quasi-topological gravity affects the regularity of solutions, identifying conditions for bounded curvature and exploring theories that restore Markov's hypothesis with universal curvature bounds.

Contribution

It develops conditions on matter stress-tensors ensuring regularity in coupled quasi-topological gravity and explores non-minimal couplings that restore Markov's hypothesis with universal curvature bounds.

Findings

Minimally coupled matter can break Markov's hypothesis but often preserves regularity.

Conditions on stress-tensors determine when solutions have bounded curvature.

Non-minimal couplings can restore universal curvature bounds, independent of mass and charge.

Abstract

Vacuum quasi-topological gravity with infinitely many terms in the action satisfies Markov's limiting curvature hypothesis: the spherically symmetric solutions are regular and all curvature invariants are bounded by solution-independent scales. We study how this picture changes when the theory is coupled to matter. We find that minimally coupled matter spoils the scaling properties of the vacuum equations that lead to the validity of Markov's hypothesis, but the corresponding geometries often remain regular. We make this precise by developing a set of sufficient conditions on general static, spherically symmetric stress-tensors such that the corresponding solutions have bounded curvature. These conditions cover regular matter sectors but also singular matter profiles that are sufficiently singular in a sense we quantify. Our conclusions hold independently of the matter field equations and include configurations in which matter exhibits divergent energy density and pressure at finite radius or at Killing horizons, results that may have implications for mass inflation in these models. We then explore non-minimal couplings, focusing on theories with infinite towers of higher-curvature and electromagnetic terms in the action. In this class, Markov's hypothesis can be restored: we present theories admitting a universal upper bound on curvature, independent of the mass and charge. Overall, our results highlight subtleties in coupling quasi-topological gravity to matter and suggest Markov's hypothesis as a potential selection criterion for resummed gravity-matter effective theories.