Related papers: Exorcising ghosts in quantum gravity

We analyze the R + R2 model of quantum gravity where terms quadratic in the curvature tensor are added to the General Relativity action. This model was recently proved to be a self-consistent quantum theory of gravitation, being both…

Quadratic gravity presents us with a renormalizable, asymptotically free theory of quantum gravity. When its couplings grow strong at some scale, as in QCD, then this strong scale sets the Planck mass. QCD has a gluon that does not appear…

This is a brief review of modified gravity cosmologies. Generically extensions of gravity action involve higher derivative terms, which can result in ghosts and instabilities. There are three ways to circumvent this: Chern-Simons terms,…

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 has been suggested that higher-derivative gravity theories coupled to a scalar field with shift symmetry may be an important candidate for a quantum gravity. We show that this class of gravity theories are renormalizable in D = 3 and 4…

Linearized four-derivative gravity with a general gauge fixing term is considered. By a Legendre transform and a suitable diagonalization procedure it is cast into a second-order equivalent form where the nature of the physical degrees of…

We construct four-dimensional covariant non-linear theories of massive gravity which are ghost-free in the decoupling limit to all orders. These theories resum explicitly all the nonlinear terms of an effective field theory of massive…

We quantise integrable point-particle systems with opposite-sign kinetic terms and nontrivial interactions. Using methods from separability theory, we show that previously determined classical stability conditions also imply discrete…

At the quantum level, the polynomial models of gravity with six and eight derivatives are superrenormalizable, but suffer from higher derivative ghost and/or tachyonic ghost states. On the other hand, these models may have advantages in the…

Numerous claims in the literature suggest that gravity induced on a higher co-dimensional surface violates unitarity in the weak coupling regime. However, it remained unclear, why a conserved source localized on this surface and giving rise…

We propose an algebraic analysis using a 3+1 decomposition to identify conditions for a clever cancellation of the higher derivatives, which plagued the theory with Ostrogradsky ghosts, by exploiting some existing degeneracy in the…

Newtons second law, Schrodingers equation and Maxwells equations are all theories composed of at most second-time derivatives. Indeed, it is not often we need to take the time derivative of the acceleration. So why are we not seeing more…

Tachyon condensation in quantum field theory (QFT) plays a central role in models of fundamental interactions and cosmology. Inspired by tower truncation in string field theory, ultraviolet completions were proposed with infinite-derivative…

The role of higher derivative operators in 4D effective field theories is discussed in both non-supersymmetric and supersymmetric contexts. The approach, formulated in the Minkowski space-time, shows that theories with higher derivative…

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…

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…

Taking the quantization of electromagnetism as the paradigm, we show how this procedure cannot work for Einstein gravity. However, it does work for conformal gravity, a fourth-order derivative, renormalizable theory of gravity that Bender…

In this work, we investigate higher-derivative quantum field theories and the problem of Ostrogradsky instability within an open-system Keldysh-Lindblad framework. Coupling the ghost sector to dissipative baths generates non-perturbative…

There is a non-trivial four-derivative extension of the gravitational spectrum that is free of ghosts and phenomenologically viable. It is the so called $R^2$-gravity since it is defined by the only addition of a term proportional to the…

An argument is presented that if a theory of quantum gravity is physically discrete at the Planck scale and the theory recovers General Relativity as an approximation, then, at the current stage of our knowledge, causal sets must arise…