Related papers: Ghost Problems from Pauli-Villars to Fourth-Order …
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…
The dressed propagator of a ghost coupled to ordinary fields develops a pair of complex conjugate poles in the first Riemann sheet above the multi-particle threshold. We study the implications of this pole structure for the asymptotic field…
Einstein-Strauss Hermitian gravity was recently formulated as a gauge theory where the tangent group is taken to be the pseudo-unitary group instead of the orthogonal group. A Higgs mechanism for massive gravity was also formulated. We…
We perform a thorough study of the theoretical consistency of recently proposed, viable, quadratic modifications of gravity that are functions of the the Gauss-Bonnet invariant, regarding the stability of their perturbations around vacuum,…
We present the theory of a supersymmetric ghost condensate coupled to N=1 supergravity. This is accomplished using a general formalism for constructing locally supersymmetric higher-derivative chiral superfield actions. The theory admits a…
In this paper, two things are done. (i) First, it is shown that any global symmetry of a gauge-invariant theory can be extended to the ghosts and the antifields so as to leave invariant the solution of the master-equation (before gauge…
Generic higher derivative theories are believed to be fundamentally unphysical because they contain Ostrogradsky ghosts. We show that within complex classical mechanics it is possible to construct higher derivative theories that circumvent…
A single geometric invariant fixes the relative normalization and structure of gravity, Yang-Mills theory, and fermion kinetic terms -- including ghost freedom in the gravitational sector -- without tuning. Our results establish a minimal…
The Hamiltonian H specifies the energy levels and time evolution of a quantum theory. A standard axiom of quantum mechanics requires that H be Hermitian because Hermiticity guarantees that the energy spectrum is real and that time evolution…
Ostrogradsky's method allows one to construct Hamiltonian formulation for a higher derivative system. An application of this approach to the Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator yields the Hamiltonian which is unbounded from below. This leads to the…
More than three decades ago quadratic gravity was found to present a perturbative, renormalizable and asymptotically free theory of quantum gravity. Unfortunately the theory appeared to have problems with a spin-2 ghost. In this essay we…
A novel theory of Quantum Gravity is presented in which the real gravitons manifest themselves as holes in space. In general, these holes propagate at the speed of light through an expanding universe with boundary denoted by U, which is…
The recently proposed infrared modification of gravity through the introduction of a ghost scalar field results in a number of interesting cosmological and phenomenological implications. In this paper, we derive the exact cosmological…
The "Auxiliary Extra Dimension" model was proposed in order to provide a geometrical interpretation to modifications of general relativity, in particular to non-linear massive gravity. In this context, the theory was shown to be ghost free…
Quantum systems governed by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with $\PT$ symmetry are special in having real energy eigenvalues bounded below and unitary time evolution. We argue that $\PT$ symmetry may also be important and present at the level…
We look at some dynamic geometries produced by scalar fields with both the "right" and the "wrong" sign of the kinetic energy. We start with anisotropic homogeneous universes with closed, open and flat spatial sections. A non-singular…
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…
We combine the unimodular gravity and mimetic gravity theories into a unified theoretical framework, which is proposed to provide a suggestive proposal for a framework that may assist in the discussion and solution search of the…
Motivated by ideas obtained from both ghost condensation and gravitational Higgs mechanism, we attempt to find classical solutions in the unitary gauge in general ghost condensation models. It is shown that depending on the form of scalar…
We review and develop the formalism of ghost number cohomologies, outlined in our previous work, to classify the quantum states of M-theory. We apply this formalism to the matrix formulation of M-theory to obtain NSR superstring action from…