Spontaneous growth of gauge fields in gravity through the Higgs mechanism

Understand

We introduce gravity theories featuring spontaneously growing gauge fields where the growth is due to the Higgs mechanism.

• The underlying physics is inspired by the spontaneous scalarization phenomena in scalar-tensor theories.
• The tachyonic instability that causes the growth in spontaneous scalarization and its analog for vector fields is introduced not as an explicit potential term, but through a scalar coupling using a Higgs field.
• The resulting theories are distinct from previous examples of spontaneous tensorization in that they respect the gauge symmetry at the level of the action.