Related papers: Ghosts & Matter Couplings in Massive (bi-&multi-)G…
(Abridged) Present cosmological constraints and the absence of a direct detection and identification of any dark matter particle candidate leave room to the possibility that the dark sector of the Universe be actually more complex than it…
We study the cosmology of general massive gravity theories with five propagating degrees of freedom. This large class of theories includes both the case with a residual Lorentz invariance as the cases with simpler rotational invariance. We…
We revisit the framework of Newer General Relativity, defined by all independent quadratic invariants of the non-metricity tensor, including the unique quadratic parity-violating term. We analyze linear perturbations around a flat FLRW…
We explore Chern-Simons theories coupled to fundamental ghost-like matter in the large $N$ limit at 't Hooft coupling $\lambda$. These theories have been conjectured to be holographically dual to parity-violating, asymptotically dS$_4$…
Ghost-free bimetric gravity is an extension of general relativity, featuring a massive spin-2 field coupled to gravity. We parameterize the theory with a set of observables having specific physical interpretations. For the background…
A recent attempt to make sense of scalars in AdS with "Neumann boundary conditions" outside of the usual BF-window $-(d/2)^2 < m^2 l^2 < -(d/2)^2 + 1$ led to pathologies including (depending on the precise context) either IR divergences or…
The vanishing of the Higgs quartic coupling at a high energy scale may be explained by Intermediate Scale Supersymmetry, where supersymmetry breaks at $(10^9$-$10^{12})$ GeV. The possible range of supersymmetry breaking scales can be…
Theories with infinite volume extra dimensions open exciting opportunities for particle physics. We argued recently that along with attractive features there are phenomenological difficulties in this class of models. In fact, there is no…
There has been growing interest in $f(Q)$ gravity, which has led to significant advancements in the field. However, it is important to note that most studies in this area were based on the coincident gauge, thus overlooking the impact of…
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…
We show that whenever a 4-dimensional theory with N particle species emerges as a consistent low energy description of a 3-brane embedded in an asymptotically-flat (4+d)-dimensional space, the holographic scale of high-dimensional gravity…
We give an introduction to massive spin-2 theories and the problem of their non-linear completion. We review the Boulware-Deser ghost problem and two ways to circumvent classic no-go theorems. In turn, massive spin-2 theories are not…
The linear theory of massive spin-two field in arbitrary curved background is investigated. In flat spacetime, the Fierz-Pauli model is well-known as the unique linear theory describing the massive spin-two field. On the other hand, in…
Degenerate scalar-tensor theories of gravity extend general relativity by a single degree of freedom, despite their equations of motion being higher than second order. In some cases, this is a mere consequence of a disformal field…
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity provide a consistent framework to accommodate an ultra-light quintessence scalar field. While the equivalence principle is respected by construction, deviations from General Relativity and standard…
We investigate strong coupling effects in a covariant massive gravity model, which is a candidate for a ghost free non-linear completion of Fierz-Pauli. We analyse the conditions to recover general relativity via Vainshtein mechanism in the…
Observational evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is limited to its gravitational effects. The extensive program for dedicated searches has yielded null results so far, challenging the most popular models. Here we propose that this is…
We derive and present symmetric ghost Lagrange densities for the coupling of General Relativity to Yang--Mills theories. The graviton-ghost is constructed with respect to the linearized de Donder gauge fixing condition and the gauge ghost…
The idea of dark matter particles coupled only gravitationally is minimalist yet viable. Assuming an additional $Z_2$-breaking linear coupling of scalar curvature to the dark matter scalar (gravity portal) Refs. arXiv:1603.03696 and…
Recently, the construction of ghost-free nonlinear massive spin-2 interactions solved a long outstanding problem in classical field theory. The consistent formulation requires a second rank-two tensor (or metric) and therefore has the form…