Related papers: On the Classical and Quantum Stability of a Cosmic…
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…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened attractive…
The theory of ghost imaging is developed in a Gaussian-state framework that both encompasses prior work - on thermal-state and biphoton-state imagers - and provides a complete understanding of the boundary between classical and quantum…
The stability of cosmological solutions in the recently suggested specific mechanism of dynamical compensation of vacuum energy is studied. It is found that the solutions in the original version lead to cosmological singularity which could…
An inspection of the precise geometric constructions underlying fundamental notions in quantum gauge field theories sheds light on various aspects which tend to be obscured in the usual formalisms. Revising the notions of mutually…
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…
Generic massive gravity models in the unitary gauge correspond to a self-gravitating medium with six degrees of freedom. It is widely believed that massive gravity models with six degrees of freedom have an unavoidable ghost-like…
A class of dynamical dark energy models is constructed through an extended version of fermion fields corresponding to phantom dark ghost spinors, which are spin one half with mass dimension one. We find that if these spinors interact with…
Certain scalar fields with higher derivative interactions and novel classical and quantum mechanical properties - the Galileons - can be naturally covariantized by coupling to nonlinear massive gravity in such a way that their symmetries…
In this paper we investigate wormhole and spherically symmetric solutions in 4D gravity plus a matter source consisting of a ghost scalar field with a sine-Gordon potential. For the wormhole solutions we also include the possibility of…
In a recently proposed model of ``ghost condensation'', spatially homogeneous states may mix, via tunneling, with inhomogeneous states which are somewhat similar to bubbles in the theory of false vacuum decay, the corresponding bubble…
In this note we investigate the stability of the classical ground state of the Quantum Hall Soliton proposed recently in hep-th/0010105 . We explore two possible perturbations which are not spherically symmetric and we find that the…
An oscillating, compact Friedmann universe with a massive conformally coupled scalar field is studied in the framework of quantum cosmology. The scalar field is treated as a perturbation and we look for solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt…
The rigorous conditions to obtain sensible predictions in non (proper) renormalizable Quantum Field Theories were derived a long time ago, most notably in the works of Steven Weinberg. In this paper we explicitly illustrate the challenges…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The…
Preservation of coherence is a fundamental yet subtle phenomenon in open systems. We uncover its relation to symmetries respected by the system Hamiltonian and its coupling to the environment. We discriminate between local and global…
It has been claimed in a series of papers that scalar fields with a fourth-order Lagrangian $\sim(\Box\varphi)^2$ can solve the cosmological constant problem by canceling the loop contributions from standard model fields, and that their…
Phantom fields with negative kinetic energy are often plagued by the vacuum quantum instability in the ultraviolet region. We present a Lorentz-violating dark energy model free from this problem and show that the crossing of the…
The stability of our vacuum is analyzed and several aspects concerning this question are reviewed. 1) In the standard Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model we review the instability towards the formation of a bubble of lower energy density and…
Dilaton stabilization may occur in a theory based on a single asymptotically free gauge group with matter due to an interplay between quantum modification of the moduli space and tree-level superpotential. We present a toy model where such…