Related papers: Do ghost fields really make massive gravity invali…
We construct examples of static, spherically symmetric wormhole solutions in general relativity with a minimally coupled scalar field $\phi$ whose kinetic energy is negative in a restricted region of space near the throat (of arbitrary…
Perturbation theory for gravity in dimensions greater than two requires higher derivatives in the free action. Higher derivatives seem to lead to ghosts, states with negative norm. We consider a fourth order scalar field theory and show…
In recent papers it has been shown that a large class of vectorization mechanisms in gravity, which involve the vector fields becoming apparently tachyonic in some regime, are actually dominated by ghosts and non-perturbative behavior.…
All solvable two-dimensional quantum gravity models have non-trivial BRST cohomology with vanishing ghost number. These states form a ring and all the other states in the theory fall into modules of this ring. The relations in the ring and…
In this manuscript we will present the theoretical framework of the recently proposed infinite derivative theory of gravity with a non-symmetric connection. We will explicitly derive the field equations at the linear level and obtain new…
Use of supergravity equations in astronomy and late-universe cosmology is often criticized on three grounds: (i) phenomenological success usually depends on the supergravity form for the scalar potential applying at the relevant energies;…
Recently, a class of theories of massive gravity has been shown to be ghost-free. We study the spherically symmetric solutions in the bigravity formulation of such theories. In general, the solutions admit both a Lorentz invariant and a…
A theory with a global $O(3)$ symmetry broken at a scale $\eta$ admits topological configurations: global monopoles realized by Goldstone fields winding around the core of false vacuum. One may expect them to behave as heavy, big composite…
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…
We study ghosts in multimetric gravity by combining the mini-superspace and the Hamiltonian constraint analysis. We first revisit bimetric gravity and explain why it is ghost-free. Then, we apply our method to trimetric gravity and clarify…
We disprove the widespread belief that higher order curvature theories of gravity in the metric-affine formalism are generally ghost-free. This is clarified by considering a sub-class of theories constructed only with the Ricci tensor and…
The swampland is the set of seemingly consistent low-energy effective field theories that cannot be consistently coupled to quantum gravity. In this review we cover some of the conjectural properties that effective theories should possess…
We demonstrate that Cherenkov radiation can be interpreted as ghost instability of a certain type. Solutions of modified gravity theories often contain ghost instabilities. One type of such ghost instability is associated with existence of…
The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) is a proposed constraint on theories with gauge fields and gravity, requiring the existence of light charged particles and/or imposing an upper bound on the field theory cutoff $\Lambda$. If taken as a…
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…
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…
It is shown that, due to soft supersymmetry breaking in gauge theories within the superfield formalism, there appears the mass for auxiliary gauge fields. It enters into the RG equations for soft masses of physical scalar particles and can…
In this paper, we construct models that admit the traversable wormhole geometries in the framework of Einstein's gravity with two scalar fields. As well known, the energy conditions are broken and we show that there appears a ghost. The…
In the recently proposed non-local theory of quantum gravity one can avoid massive tensor ghosts at the tree level by a special choice of the non-local form factor between the two Ricci tensors. We show that at the quantum level this theory…
We show that the recently proposed weak gravity conjecture\cite{AMNV0601} can be extended to a class of scalar field theories. Taking gravity into account, we find an upper bound on the gravity interaction strength, expressed in terms of…