Massive Galileons and Vainshtein Screening

Understand

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.