Related papers: Exorcising ghosts in quantum gravity
In the framework of asymptotic safety, we study quantum quadratic gravity in the presence of the Higgs field considered as non-separable from the vacuum. The theory flows to a high energy fixed point where the Higgs field is strongly…
Fourth order derivative gravity in 3+1-dimensions is perturbatively renormalizable and is shown to describe a unitary theory of gravitons in a limited coupling parameter space. The running gravitational constant which includes graviton…
We argue that four-dimensional quantum gravity may be essentially renormalizable if one relaxes the assumption of metricity of the theory. We work with Plebanski formulation of general relativity in which the metric (tetrad), the…
The asymptotic safety scenario in quantum gravity is reviewed, according to which a renormalizable quantum theory of the gravitational field is feasible which reconciles asymptotically safe couplings with unitarity. All presently known…
We study a sixth order derivative scalar field model in Minkowski spacetime as a toy model of higher-derivative critical gravity theories. This model is consistently quantized when using the Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) quantization…
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…
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 explore the properties of a simple renormalizable shift symmetric model with a higher derivative kinetic energy and quartic derivative coupling, that can serve as a toy model for higher derivative theories of gravity. The scattering…
We show how infinite derivative modifications of gravity impact on the stochastic background of Gravitational Waves from early Universe. The generic property of the ghost-free theory fixed on Minkowski space-time is the emergence of an…
In this paper we wish to find the corresponding Gibbons-Hawking-York term for the most general quadratic in curvature gravity by using Coframe slicing within the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) decomposition of spacetime in four dimensions. In…
It is known that much of the structure of string theory can be derived from three-dimensional topological field theory and gravity. We show here that, at least for simple topologies, the string diffeomorphism ghosts can also be explained in…
We revisit nonsingular cosmologies in which the limiting curvature hypothesis is realized. We study the cosmological perturbations of the theory and determine the general criteria for stability. For the simplest model, we find generic…
We study new classes of metric transformations in the context of scalar-tensor theories, which involve both higher derivatives of the scalar field and derivatives of the metric itself. In general, such transformations are not invertible as…
We derive the N=1 supersymmetric extension for a class of weakly nonlocal four dimensional gravitational theories.The construction is explicitly done in the superspace and the tree-level perturbative unitarity is explicitly proved both in…
We study cosmological perturbations in mimetic matter scenario with a general higher derivative function. We calculate the quadratic action and show that both the kinetic term and the gradient term have the wrong sings. We perform the…
We study the particle content of higher derivative theories of gravity built with contractions of the Riemann tensor and its covariant derivatives. In the absence of the latter, there is a family of theories exhibiting an Einsteinian…
A simple technique for the construction of gravity theories in Born-Infeld style is presented, and the properties of some of these novel theories are investigated. They regularize the positive energy Schwarzschild singularity, and a large…
We show that the strong self-interaction of the scalar polarization of a massive graviton can be understood in terms of the propagation of an extra ghost-like degree of freedom, thus relating strong coupling to the sixth degree of freedom…
Cosmological observations allow the possibility that dark energy is caused by phantom fields. These fields typically lead to the occurrence of singularities in the late Universe. We review here the status of phantom singularities and their…
It has long been understood that certain theories of ghost free massive gravity and their multi-graviton extensions can be thought of as arising from a higher dimensional theory of gravity, upon discretising the extra dimension. However,…