Note on stability and microcausality in Lorentz violating antisymmetric tensor field

Abstract

The fundamental issues of microcausality and energy positivity conditions are important to be investigated in the context of spontaneous Lorentz violating theories. We check the microcausality and energy positivity conditions for a free rank-2 antisymmetric tensor field with spontaneous Lorentz violating term and a classically equivalent vector theory from dispersion relations and propagators, and find that the two theories lead to different conditions. While the antisymmetric tensor theory satisfies energy positivity condition and can satisfy microcausality condition for a particular choice of vacuum value, the vector theory violates both energy positivity and microcausality conditions.