Stability in designer gravity

Abstract

We study the stability of designer gravity theories, in which one considers gravity coupled to a tachyonic scalar with anti-de Sitter (AdS) boundary conditions defined by a smooth function W. We construct Hamiltonian generators of the asymptotic symmetries using the covariant phase space method of Wald et al and find that they differ from the spinor charges except when W = 0. The positivity of the spinor charge is used to establish a lower bound on the conserved energy of any solution that satisfies boundary conditions for which W has a global minimum. A large class of designer gravity theories therefore have a stable ground state, which the AdS/CFT correspondence indicates should be the lowest energy soliton. We make progress towards proving this by showing that minimum energy solutions are static. The generalization of our results to designer gravity theories in higher dimensions involving several tachyonic scalars is discussed.