Related papers: Giving up the ghost
The cosmological constant problem and the compatibility of gravity with quantum mechanics are the two most pressing problems in all of gravitational theory. While string theory nicely addresses the latter, it has so far failed to provide…
We study the metric perturbations around the de Sitter and Minkowski backgrounds in Conformal Gravity. We confirm the presence of ghosts in both cases. In the de Sitter case, by applying the Maldacena boundary conditions - the Neumann…
Einstein Podolsky Rosen quantum correlations are discussed from the perspective of a ghost field introduced by Einstein. The concepts of ghost field, hidden variables, local reality and the Bell inequality are reviewed. In the framework of…
We analyze the unitarity properties of higher derivative quantum field theories which are free of ghosts and ultraviolet singularities. We point out that in spite of the absence of ghosts most of these theories are not unitary. This result…
Higher derivative quantum corrections are essential components of scalar tensor effective field theories (EFTs), yet they typically reintroduce the Ostrogradsky ghost instability that the classical theory was designed to evade. This paper…
Galileons are higher-derivative theories of a real scalar which nevertheless admit second order equations of motion. They have interesting applications as dark energy models and in early universe cosmology, and have been conjectured to…
Describing systems with non-Hermitian (NH) operators remains a challenge in quantum theory due to instabilities (e.g., exceptional points and decoherence) arising from interactions with the environment. We propose a framework to express the…
The Feshbach-type reduction of the Hilbert space to the physically most relevant "model" subspace is suggested as a means of a formal unification of the standard quantum mechanics with its recently proposed PT symmetric modification. The…
$\Psi$-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has…
The first mathematically consistent exact equations of quantum gravity in the Heisenberg representation and Hamilton gauge are obtained. It is shown that the path integral over the canonical variables in the Hamilton gauge is mathematically…
We show that statistics is crucial for the instability problem derived from higher time derivatives. In fact, and contrary to previous statements, we check that when dealing with Fermi systems, the Hamiltonian is well bounded and the…
A consistent physical theory of quantum mechanics can be built on a complex Hamiltonian that is not Hermitian but instead satisfies the physical condition of space-time reflection symmetry (PT symmetry). Thus, there are infinitely many new…
We explore perturbations about a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background in Chern-Simons gravity. At large momenta one of the two circularly polarized tensor modes becomes ghostlike. We argue that nevertheless the theory does not exhibit…
The quantization of the electroweak theory is performed starting from the Lagrangian given in the so-called unitary gauge in which the unphysical Goldstone fields disappear. In such a Lagrangian, the unphysical longitudinal components of…
We explicitly show that general local higher-derivative theories with only complex conjugate ghosts and normal real particles are unitary at any perturbative order in the loop expansion. The proof presented here relies on integrating the…
It is shown that the interacting Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator necessarily leads to a description with a Hamiltonian that contains positive and negative energies associated with two oscillators. Descriptions with a positive definite…
Viewed through the lens of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism, we demonstrate that higher-form currents with nonzero ghost number also define higher-form symmetries, directly analogous to the standard higher-form symmetries with ghost number…
Complex mass poles, or ghost poles, are present in the Hartree-Fock solution of the Schwinger-Dyson equation for the nucleon propagator in renormalizable models with Yukawa-type meson-nucleon couplings, as shown many years ago by Brown,…
A renormalizable coupling between the Higgs and a scalar unparticle operator O_U of non-integer dimension d_U < 2 gives rise, after electroweak symmetry breaking, to a mass gap in the unparticle continuum and a shift in the original Higgs…
In this paper an attempt is made to understand the passage from the exact quantum treatment of the CGHS theory to the semi-classical physics discussed by many authors. We find first that to the order of accuracy to which Hawking effects are…