Related papers: Do ghost fields really make massive gravity invali…
A ghost free massive deformation of unimodular gravity (UG), in the spirit of {\em mimetic massive gravity}, is shown to exist. This construction avoids the no-go theorem for a Fierz-Pauli type of mass term in UG by giving up on Lorentz…
The existence of a small, non-zero cosmological constant is one of the major puzzles in fundamental physics. Naively, quantum field theory arguments would imply a cosmological constant which is up to 10$^{120}$ times larger than the…
We perform the Hamiltonian analysis of the bimetric theory of gravity introduced in [arXiv:1109.3515 [hep-th]]. We carefully analyze the requirement of the preservation of all constraints and we find that there is no additional constraint…
It is shown that space curvature can be disposed of by properly taking into account gravitational self energies. This leads to a parameter free modification of Newton's law, violating Gauss theorem, which accounts for the crucial tests of…
We explore the possibility of parity-violating, nonminimally coupled 2-form field theories that retain the same dynamical degrees of freedom as a massive 2-form and thus are ghost-free. Starting from the most general kinetic terms and…
Modified gravity theories are a popular alternative to dark energy as a possible explanation for the observed accelerating cosmic expansion, and their cosmological tests are currently an active research field. Studies in recent years have…
An auxiliary metric (reference metric) is inevitable in massive gravity theory. In the scenario of gauge/gravity duality, a singular reference metric corresponds to momentum dissipations, which describes the electric and heat conductivity…
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…
In this brief review, we examine the theoretical consistency and viability of phantom dark energy. Almost all data sets from cosmological probes are compatible with dark energy of the phantom variety (i.e., equation-of-state parameter…
We analyze the unitarity properties of higher derivative quantum field theories which are free of ghosts and ultraviolet singularities. We point out that in spite of the absence of ghosts most of these theories are not unitary. This result…
One of the remarkable differences between renormalizable quantum gravity with four-derivative action and its superrenormalizable polynomial generalizations is that the latter admit a more sophisticated particle mass spectrum. Already in the…
A common property of known black hole solutions in (2+1)-dimensional gravity is that they require a negative cosmological constant. In this letter, it is shown that a (2+1)-dimensional gravity theory which satisfies the dominant energy…
We point out that spacetime singularities play a useful role in gravitational theories by eliminating unphysical solutions. In particular, we argue that any modification of general relativity which is completely nonsingular cannot have a…
We consider Higgs massive gravity [1,2] and investigate whether a nonlinear ghost in this theory can be avoided. We show that although the theory considered in [10,11] is ghost free in the decoupling limit, the ghost nevertheless reappears…
Most of the approaches to the construction of a theory of quantum gravity share some principles which do not have specific experimental support up to date. Two of these principles are relevant for our discussion: (i) the gravitational field…
The possibility of flat metric solutions in the presence of arbitrary, in particular, Planck mass sized cosmological constants is investigated within multigravity theory, the ghost-free theory of $(N+1)$ rank-2 tensor fields comprising one…
This paper presents reflections on the validity of a series of mathematical methods and technical assumptions that are encrusted in macrophysics (related to gravitational interaction), that seem to have little or no physical significance.…
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 investigate the stability against inhomogeneous perturbations and the appearance of ghost modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravitational theories with a non-minimally coupled scalar field, which can be regarded as either the dilaton or a…
We discuss the subtle relationship between massive gravity and bimetric gravity, focusing particularly on the manner in which massive gravity may be viewed as a suitable limit of bimetric gravity. The limiting procedure is more delicate…