Related papers: Living with ghosts in Lorentz invariant theories
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,…
In theories with a hidden ghost sector that couples to visible matter through gravity only, empty space can decay into ghosts and ordinary matter by graviton exchange. Perturbatively, such processes can be very slow provided that the…
It has been suggested that a scalar field with negative kinetic energy, or ``ghost,'' could be the source of the observed late-time cosmological acceleration. Naively, such theories should be ruled out by the catastrophic quantum…
We analyze the pattern of normal modes in linearized Lorentz-violating massive gravity over the 5-dimensional moduli space of mass terms. Ghost-free theories arise at bifurcation points when the ghosts get out of the spectrum of propagating…
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 systematically study the most general Lorentz-violating graviton mass invariant under three-dimensional Eucledian group using the explicitly covariant language. We find that at general values of mass parameters the massive graviton has…
We consider the branch of the projectable Horava-Lifshitz model which exhibits ghost instabilities in the low energy limit. It turns out that, due to the Lorentz violating structure of the model and to the presence of a finite strong…
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 aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
We explore the nonlinear dynamics of classical field theories containing ghost degrees of freedom, focusing on two coupled scalar fields with opposite kinetic terms in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Using a spacetime…
If textbook Lorentz invariance is actually a property of the equations describing a sector of the excitations of vacuum above some critical distance scale, several sectors of matter with different critical speeds in vacuum can coexist and…
If textbook Lorentz invariance is actually a property of the equations describing a sector of the excitations of vacuum above some critical distance scale, several sectors of matter with different critical speeds in vacuum can coexist and…
A vacuum instability due to a massless ghost in a hidden sector can lead to an effective equation of state for dark energy that changes smoothly from $w=-3/2$ at large redshifts, to $w\approx-1.2$ today, to $w=-1$ in the future. We discuss…
We provide a full analysis of ghost free higher derivative field theories with coupled degrees of freedom. Assuming the absence of gauge symmetries, we derive the degeneracy conditions in order to evade the Ostrogradsky ghosts, and analyze…
In relative locality theories the geometric properties of phase space depart from the standard ones given by the fact that spaces of momenta are linear fibers over a spacetime base manifold. In particular here it is assumed that the…
In the context of Lorentz-invariant massive gravity we show that classical solutions around heavy sources are plagued by ghost instabilities. The ghost shows up in the effective field theory at huge distances from the source, much bigger…
The ghost-free theory of massive gravity with two dynamical metrics has been shown to produce viable cosmological expansion, where the late-time acceleration of the Universe is due to the finite range of the gravitational interaction rather…
Perturbation theory for gravity in dimensions greater than two requires higher derivatives in the free action. Higher derivatives seem to lead to ghosts, states with negative norm. We consider a fourth order scalar field theory and show…
If textbook Lorentz invariance is actually a property of the equations describing a sector of matter above some critical distance scale, several sectors of matter with different critical speeds in vacuum can coexist and an absolute rest…
Theories that spontaneously break Lorentz invariance also violate diffeomorphism symmetries, implying the existence of extra degrees of freedom and modifications of gravity. In the minimal model (``ghost condensation'') with only a single…