Related papers: Gravitational Waves and Perspectives for Quantum G…
Generic higher derivative theories are believed to be fundamentally unphysical because they contain Ostrogradsky ghosts. We show that within complex classical mechanics it is possible to construct higher derivative theories that circumvent…
We consider the full effective theory for quantum gravity at second order in curvature including non-local terms. We show that the theory contains two new degrees of freedom beyond the massless graviton: namely a massive spin-2 ghost and a…
The dynamics of metric perturbations is explored in the gravity theory with anomaly-induced quantum corrections. Our first purpose is to derive the equation for gravitational waves in this theory on the general homogeneous and isotropic…
In this paper we study gravitational wave perturbations in a cosmological setting of bigravity which can reproduce the {\Lambda}CDM background and large scale structure. We show that in general gravitational wave perturbations are unstable…
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 discuss aspects of non-perturbative unitarity in quantum field theory. The additional ghost degrees of freedom arising in "truncations" of an effective action at a finite order in derivatives could be fictitious degrees of freedom. Their…
With an appropriate choice of parameters, a higher derivative theory of gravity can describe a normal massive sector and a ghost massless sector. We show that, when defined on an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime with Dirichlet boundary…
The detection of gravitational waves in 2015 ushered in a new era of gravitational wave astronomy capable of probing into the strong field dynamics of black holes and neutron stars. It has opened up an exciting new window for laboratory and…
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 this paper we study perturbatively an extension of the Stelle higher derivative gravity involving an infinite number of derivative terms. We know that the usual quadratic action is renormalizable but suffers of the unitarity problem…
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,…
We remark that Ostrogradsky ghosts in higher-derivative gravity, with a finite number of derivatives, are fictitious as they result from an unjustified truncation performed in a complete theory containing infinitely many curvature…
Adding terms quadratic in the curvature to the Einstein-Hilbert action renders gravity renormalizable. This property is preserved in the presence of the most general renormalizable couplings with (and of) a generic quantum field theory…
We introduce new techniques that can preserve unitarity of the system including ghost particles. Negative norms of the particles can be involved in zero-norm states by constraints of the physical space. These are useful to apply the…
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…
We analyze the perturbative implications of the most general high derivative approach to quantum gravity based on a diffeomorphism invariant local action. In particular, we consider the super-renormalizable case with a large number of…
In the first order formalism of gravitational theories, the spacetime connection is considered as an independent variable to vary together with the metric. However, the metric still generates its Levi-Civita connection that turns out to…
We discuss the quantum mechanical description of a gravitational wave interacting with a cavity electromagnetic field. Quantum fluctuations of the gravitational vacuum induce squeezing in the optical field. Moreover, this squeezing…
We present a set of equations describing the cosmological gravitational wave in a gravity theory with quadratic order gravitational coupling terms which naturally arise in quantum correction procedures. It is known that the gravitational…
Ghost fields have reemerged in a handful of phenomenologically motivated cosmological and particle physics scenarios, and most recently in a cyclic mechanism to address the fine-tuning of gauge couplings in the standard model. We study the…