Related papers: Counting ghosts in the "ghost-free" non-local grav…
The Hessian's determinant for a version of massive gravity given by an infinite expansion of a square root function of the induced metric, vanishes. We show that it allows us to eliminate one of four scalar fields used to generate the…
It was recently found that there are classes of nonlocal gravity theories that are free of ghosts and singularities in their Newtonian limit [PRL, 108 (2012), 031101]. In these proceedings, a detailed and pedagogical derivation of a main…
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…
Some phantom cosmological models without big rip singularity have been constructed in a simple extended theory of gravity. In the geometrical part of the action, a minimally coupled linear function of the Ricci Scalar and the trace of the…
Theories which contain ghost fields are considered to be invalid. It is assumed that for such theories the energy is unbounded from below, and the theory will be unstable, allowing the creation of particle pairs with arbitrarily large…
In this paper we investigate possible consistent ghost-free models containing massive spin 2 particles in three dimensions. We work in a constructive approach based on the frame-like gauge invariant description for such massive spin 2…
An extension of the bimetric theory of gravity is considered that includes quadratic Ricci curvature terms associated with each metric. The issue of the Boulware-Deser ghost is analyzed. The Hamiltonian constraint is derived and the…
We show that a class of nonlocal gravity models, proposed to explain current cosmic acceleration without dark energy, passes two major tests: First, they can be defined so as not to alter the, observationally correct, general relativity…
We study a novel class of higher curvature gravity models in $n$ spacetime dimensions which we call Ricci polynomial gravity. The action is consisted purely of a polynomial in Ricci curvature of order $N$. In the absence of the second order…
The study of linear perturbation theory for general functions of the Ricci and Gauss-Bonnet scalars is done over an empty anisotropic universe, i.e. the Kasner-type background, in order to show that an anisotropic background in general has…
We work out the quantization of the massless vector field by introducing quantum supersymmetric ghosts. We prove positivity in the physical Fock space.
The energy in the ghost-free massive gravity theory is calculated via explicitly resolving the initial value constraints for spherically symmetric deformations of flat space. It turns out that the energy is positive in some cases, but in…
The present letter considers the quantization method developed in [1]-[9], which postulates that, in several situations, negative norm or ghost states can be avoided in order to give positive probabilities. These authors also postulate a…
Understanding the role of higher derivatives is probably one of the most relevant questions in quantum gravity theory. Already at the semiclassical level, when gravity is a classical background for quantum matter fields, the action of…
We present a detailed study of the viability of general vector-tensor theories of gravity in the presence of an arbitrary temporal background vector field. We find that there are six different classes of theories which are indistinguishable…
We present a novel way to constrain the ghost field with respect to other physical fields present in a given theory such that the theory becomes quantizable. This is achieved by imposing positivity of the total kinetic energy of the system…
We compute the one-loop quantum corrections to the potential of ghost-free massive gravity. We show how the mass of external matter fields contribute to the running of the cosmological constant, but do not change the ghost-free structure of…
It is shown that polynomial gravity theories with more than four derivatives in each scalar and tensor sectors have a regular weak-field limit, without curvature singularities. This is achieved by proving that in these models the effect of…
We study a metric cubic gravity theory considering odd-parity modes of linear inhomogeneous perturbations on a spatially homogeneous Bianchi type I manifold close to the isotropic de Sitter spacetime. We show that in the regime of small…
We reconsider the Lee-Wick (LW) models and compare their properties to the properties of the models that contain purely virtual particles. We argue against the LW premise that unstable particles can be removed from the sets of incoming and…