Related papers: Ghost instabilities of cosmological models with ve…
The new ekpyrotic scenario attempts to solve the singularity problem by involving violation of the null energy condition in a model which combines the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario with the ghost condensate theory and the curvaton mechanism of…
We review the history of the ghost problem in quantum field theory from the Pauli-Villars regulator theory to currently popular fourth-order derivative quantum gravity theories. While these theories all appear to have unitarity-violating…
Spontaneous scalarization is a mechanism that allows a scalar field to go undetected in weak gravity environments and yet develop a nontrivial configuration in strongly gravitating systems. At the perturbative level it manifests as a…
Recently modified gravitational theories which mimic the behaviour of dark matter, the so-called "Mimetic Dark Matter", have been proposed. We study the consistency of such theories with respect to the absence of ghost instability and…
In this work we shall address the ghost issue of $F\left( R,\mathcal{G} \right)$ gravity, which is known to be plagued with ghost degrees of freedom. These ghosts occur due to the presence of higher than two derivatives in the field…
In the Horndeski's most general scalar-tensor theories with second-order field equations, we derive the conditions for the avoidance of ghosts and Laplacian instabilities associated with scalar, tensor, and vector perturbations in the…
Many theories of modified gravity with higher order derivatives are usually ignored because of serious problems that appear due to an additional ghost degree of freedom. Most dangerously, it causes an immediate decay of the vacuum. However,…
A class of vector-tensor theories arises naturally in the framework of quadratic gravity in spacetimes with linear vector distortion. Requiring the absence of ghosts for the vector field imposes an interesting condition on the allowed…
We study cosmological applications of extended vector-tensor theories, whose Lagrangians contain up to two derivatives with respect to metric and vector field. We derive background equations under the assumption of homogeneous and isotropic…
We review some of the recent results which can be useful for better understanding of the problem of stability of vacuum and in general classical solutions in higher derivative quantum gravity. The fourth derivative terms in the purely…
Recent work has shown that non-local modifications of the Einstein equations can have interesting cosmological consequences and can provide a dynamical origin for dark energy, consistent with existing data. At first sight these theories are…
We present a new understanding of the unstable ghost-like resonance which appears in theories such as quadratic gravity and Lee-Wick type theories. Quantum corrections make this resonance unstable, such that it does not appear in the…
In generalized Proca theories with vector-field derivative couplings, a bunch of hairy black hole solutions have been derived on a static and spherically symmetric background. In this paper, we formulate the odd-parity black hole…
General Relativity (GR) is an effective field theory valid in the infrared regime. Quadratic curvature extensions intended to probe ultraviolet physics generically propagate a massive spin-$2$ ghost and are therefore non-unitary. One route…
We consider cosmological models with a dynamical dark energy field, and study the presence of three types of commonly found instabilities, namely ghost (when fields have negative kinetic energy), gradient (negative momentum squared) and…
We investigate the scalar and vector modes arising from cosmological perturbations within the framework of an inflationary scenario driven by an antisymmetric tensor field, minimally coupled to gravity. After eliminating gauge artifacts,…
We show that general infrared modifications of the Einstein-Hilbert action obtained by addition of curvature invariants are not viable. These modifications contain either ghosts or light gravity scalars. A very specific fine-tuning might…
We analyze the behavior of linear perturbations in vector inflation. In contrast to the scalar field inflation, the linearized theory with vector fields contains couplings between scalar, vector and tensor modes. The perturbations decouple…
We study the physical propagating modes in a massive gravity model in curved cosmological backgrounds, which we have found as classical solutions in our previous paper. We show that, generically, there exist such the cosmological background…
Ghost fields in quantum field theory have been a long-standing problem. Specifically, theories with higher derivatives involve ghosts that appear in the Hamiltonian in the form of linear momenta term, which is commonly known as the…