Related papers: Recent Progress in Fighting Ghosts in Quantum Grav…
A renormalizable theory of gravity is obtained if the dimension-less 4-derivative kinetic term of the graviton, which classically suffers from negative unbounded energy, admits a sensible quantisation. We find that a 4-derivative degree of…
A quantum ghost that destabilizes the Schwarzschild solution, transforming it into a naked singularity, may seem like a physicist's worst nightmare. However, we argue that this scenario represents the natural evolution of a black hole…
Theories with fourth-order derivatives, including the Lee-Wick finite QED model and Quadratic Gravity, have a better UV behaviour, but the presence of negative metric ghost modes endanger unitarity. Noticing that the ghost acquires a…
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…
The effective action in renormalizable quantum theory of gravity provides entropy because the total Hamiltonian vanishes. Since it is a renormalization group invariant that is constant in the process of cosmic evolution, we can show…
An alternative to the effective field theory approach to treat ghosts in higher derivative theories is to attempt to integrate them out via the Euclidean path integral formalism. It has been suggested that this method could provide a…
A tachyon is considered to be sick in the context of particle mechanics, but in field theory just indicates instability of a background. We consider a similar possibility that a ghost in field theory might be just an indication of…
Any attempt to regularize a negative tension brane through a bulk scalar requires that this field is a ghost. One can try to improve in this aspect in a number of ways. For instance, it has been suggested to employ a field whose kinetic…
"Brane Induced Gravity" is regarded as a promising framework for addressing the cosmological constant problem, but it also suffers from a ghost instability for parameter values that make it phenomenologically viable. We carry out a detailed…
We consider the modified Korteweg-de Vries equation, $ u_{xxx} + 6u^2 u_x + u_t \ =\ 0 $, and explore its dynamics in {\it spatial} direction. Higher $x$ derivatives bring about the {\it ghosts}. We argue that these ghosts are benign, i.e.…
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…
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…
A central aspect of the cosmological constant problem is to understand why vacuum energy does not gravitate. In order to account for this observation, while allowing for nontrivial dynamics of the quantum vacuum, we motivate a novel…
We discuss exactly solvable systems involving integrals of motion with higher powers of momenta. If one of these integrals is chosen for the Hamiltonian, we obtain a higher-derivative system involving ghosts, i.e. a system whose Hamiltonian…
4-derivative gravity provides a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity at the price of introducing a physical ghost, which could admit a sensible positive-energy quantization. To understand its physics, we compute ghost-mediated…
One of the obstacles to reconciling quantum theory with general relativity, is constructing a theory which is both consistent with observation, and and gives finite answers at high energy, so that the theory holds at arbitrarily short…
A unified theory of four-dimensional gravity together with the standard model is presented, with supersymmetry breaking of M-theory at a TeV. Masses of the the known particles are derived. The cosmological constant is quantum generated to…
We present a thorough stability analysis of modified gravity theories in the presence of matter fields. We use the Effective Field Theory framework for Dark Energy and Modified Gravity to retain a general approach for the gravity sector and…
5D superconformal theories involve vacuum valleys characterized in the simplest case by the vacuum expectation value of a real scalar field. If it is nonzero, conformal invariance is spontaneously broken and the theory is not…
In 3+1 space-time dimensions, fourth order derivative gravity is perturbatively renormalizable. Here it is shown that it describes a unitary theory of gravitons (with/without an additional scalar) in a limited coupling parameter space which…