Related papers: Ghost Problems from Pauli-Villars to Fourth-Order …
Unimodular gravity addresses the old cosmological constant (CC) problem, explaining why such constant is not at least as large as the largest particle mass scale, but classically it is indistinguishable from ordinary gravity. Conversely,…
Theories which contain ghost fields are considered to be invalid. It is assumed that for such theories the energy is unbounded from below, and the theory will be unstable, allowing the creation of particle pairs with arbitrarily large…
In this paper we introduce a perturbatively super-renormalizable and unitary theory of quantum gravity in any dimension D. The theory presents two entire functions, a.k.a. "form factors", and a finite number of local operators required by…
We compute the ghost anomalous dimension within the asymptotic-safety scenario for quantum gravity. For a class of covariant gauge fixings and using a functional RG scheme, the anomalous dimension $\eta_c$ is negative, implying an improved…
The (old) cosmological constant problem consists of two different problems. The first is the huge discrepancy between the value of the cosmological constant deduced from observations and its value expected from cosmological constant-like…
The action for gravity and the standard model includes, as well as the positive energy fermion and boson fields, negative energy fields. The Hamiltonian for the action leads through a positive and negative energy symmetry of the vacuum to a…
One of the leading issues in quantum field theory and cosmology is the mismatch between the observed and calculated values for the cosmological constant in Einstein's field equations of up to 120 orders of magnitude. In this paper, we…
We extend the four-dimensional de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) massive gravity model to a general scalar massive-tensor theory in arbitrary dimensions, coupling a dRGT massive graviton to multiple scalars and allowing for generic kinetic…
Recently modified gravitational theories which mimic the behaviour of dark matter, the so-called "Mimetic Dark Matter", have been proposed. We study the consistency of such theories with respect to the absence of ghost instability and…
We argue that Lee-Wick's complex ghost appearing in any higher derivative theory is stable and its asymptotic field exists. It may be more appropriate to call it ``anti-unstable" in the sense that, the more the ghost `decays' into lighter…
The Cosmological Constant Problem emerges when Quantum Field Theory is applied to the gravitational theory, due to the enormous magnitude of the induced energy of the vacuum. The unique known solution of this problem involves an extremely…
It is shown that the standard formulation of quantum mechanics in terms of Hermitian Hamiltonians is overly restrictive. A consistent physical theory of quantum mechanics can be built on a complex Hamiltonian that is not Hermitian but…
An effective action of ghost condensate with higher derivatives creates a source of gravity and mimics a dark matter in spiral galaxies. We present a spherically symmetric static solution of Einstein--Hilbert equations with the ghost…
We find unitary and local theories of higher curvature gravity in the vielbein formalism, known as the Poincar\'{e} gauge theory by utilizing the equivalence to the ghost-free massive bigravity. We especially focus on three and four…
We consider a class of non-local gravity theories where the Lagrangian is a function of powers of the inverse d'Alembertian operator acting on the Ricci scalar. We take an approach in which the non-local Lagrangian is made local by…
The Ostrogradski ghost problem that appears in higher derivative theories containing constraints has been considered here. Specifically we have considered systems where only the second class constraints appear. For these kind of systems, it…
In this letter we point out that the massive gravity theory with a graviton ghost mode in de Sitter background cannot possess a de Sitter invariant vacuum state. In order to avoid a negative norm state, we must associate the creation…
In this paper, we investigate three important issues: stability, ghost and strong coupling, in the Horava-Melby-Thompson setup of the Horava-Lifshitz theory with $\lambda \not= 1$, generalized recently by da Silva. We first develop the…
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…
Using the Dirac constraint method we show that the pure fourth-order Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator model is free of observable negative norm states. Even though such ghosts do appear when the fourth order theory is coupled to a second order…