Related papers: Exorcising Ghosts in Induced Gravity
$f(Q)$ gravity is an extension of the symmetric teleparallel equivalent to general relativity (STEGR). This work shows that based on the scalar-nonmetricity formulation, a scalar mode in $f(Q)$ gravity has a negative kinetic energy. This…
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…
Ghost-free bimetric gravity is a theory of two interacting spin-2 fields, one massless and one massive, in addition to the standard matter particles and fields, thereby generalizing Einstein's theory of general relativity. To parameterize…
The mass of the graviton can be generated using a Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism with four scalar fields. We show that when one of these fields is costrained as in mimetic gravity, the massive gravity obtained is ghost free and consistent.…
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…
The recently proposed infrared modification of gravity through the introduction of a ghost scalar field results in a number of interesting cosmological and phenomenological implications. In this paper, we derive the exact cosmological…
We construct a model unifying gravity with weak $SU(2)$ gauge and "Higgs" scalar fields. We assume the existence of a visible and an invisible (hidden) sector of the Universe. We used the extension of Plebanski's 4-dimensional gravitational…
4D Einstein gravity coupled to scalars and abelian gauge fields in its 2-Killing vector reduction is shown to be quasi-renormalizable to all loop orders at the expense of introducing infinitely many essential couplings. The latter can be…
We develop a hybrid formalism suitable for modeling scalar field dark matter, in which the phase-space distribution associated to the real scalar field is modeled by statistical equal-time two-point functions and gravity is treated by two…
A local phenomenological model that reduces to a non-local gravitational theory giving dark energy is proposed. The non-local gravity action is known to fit the data as well as $\Lambda$-CDM thereby demanding a more fundamental local…
Interest has focussed recently on low energy implications of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory with an IR fixed point, manifest in terms of ``unparticles'' with peculiar properties. If unparticle stuff exists…
Within the functional renormalization group approach we study the effective QFT of Einstein gravity and one self-interacting scalar coupled to N_f Dirac fermions. We include in our analysis the matter anomalous dimensions induced by all the…
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…
Linear stability of brane induced gravity in two codimensions on a static pure tension background is investigated. The brane is regularized as a ring of finite circumference in extra space. By explicitly calculating the vacuum persistence…
We analyze perturbative aspects of gauged matrix models, including those where classically the gauge symmetry is partially broken. Ghost fields play a crucial role in the Feynman rules for these vacua. We use this formalism to elucidate the…
We construct an induced gravity (pregeometry) where both the Newton constant and the cosmological constant appear as integration constants in solving field equations. By adding the kinetic terms of ghosts and antighosts, an action of the…
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…
We study the renormalization group flow of gravity coupled to scalar matter using functional renormalization group techniques. The novel feature is the inclusion of higher-derivative terms in the scalar propagator. Such terms give rise to…
We put forward the idea that in addition to diffeomorphism invariance of general relativity (GR) the gravitational interaction is invariant under arbitrary scale-deformations of the metric field. In addition, we assume that the scaling…
We study the creation and evolution of cosmological perturbations in renormalizable quadratic gravity with a Weyl term. We adopt a prescription that implies the stability of the vacuum at the price of introducing a massive spin-two ghost…