Related papers: Ghost Problems from Pauli-Villars to Fourth-Order …
Theories with curvature squared terms in the action are known to contain ghost modes in general. However, if we regard curvature squared terms as quantum corrections to the original theory, the emergence of ghosts may be simply due to the…
The cosmological constant problem is principally concerned with trying to understand how the zero-point energy of quantum fields contributes to gravity. Here we take the approach that by addressing a fundamental unresolved issue in quantum…
We investigate the parity-violating scalar-tensor theory and pay special attention to terms that are free of the Ostrogradsky ghost in the unitary gauge, i.e., when the scalar field possesses a timelike gradient. We exhaustively identify…
Ghost-free bimetric theory can describe gravity in the presence of an extra spin-2 field. We study certain aspects of dynamics in this theory: (1) It is shown that if either of the metrics is an Einstein solution then the other is always…
In the framework of the covariant canonical formalism of quadratic gravity, we consider the problem of confinement of massive ghost which violates the unitarity of the physical S-matrix. It is shown that if there is a bound state between…
The local action of an SU(2) gauge theory in general covariant Abelian gauges and the associated equivariant BRST symmetry that guarantees the perturbative renormalizability of the model are given. A global SL(2,R) symmetry of the model is…
A crucial problem in quantum cosmology is a careful analysis of the one-loop semiclassical approximation for the wave function of the universe, after an appropriate choice of mixed boundary conditions. The results for Euclidean quantum…
We study a metric cubic gravity theory considering odd-parity modes of linear inhomogeneous perturbations on a spatially homogeneous Bianchi type I manifold close to the isotropic de Sitter spacetime. We show that in the regime of small…
We discuss the problems of quantum theory (QT) complicating its merging with general relativity (GR). QT is treated as a general theory of micro-phenomena - a bunch of models. Quantum mechanics (QM) and quantum field theory (QFT) are the…
We show that the Hamiltonian HQ introduced in the course of BRST analysis of a gauge theory may in fact be associated with an action that itself is gauge invariant. This action can then be treated using the BRST formalism. We illustrate…
We propose a novel class of degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor theories as an extension of mimetic gravity. By performing a noninvertible conformal transformation on "seed" scalar-tensor theories which may be nondegenerate, we can…
Classical instability in fourth order gravity is cured at the expense of unitarity. The appearance of hidden degrees of freedom replicating those of ordinary matter allows for ordinary thermodynamic entropy and black hole entropy to be…
Four-dimensional quantum field theories generally require regularization to be well defined. This can be done in various ways, but here we focus on Pauli--Villars (PV) regularization and apply it to nonperturbative calculations of bound…
We discuss the Hamiltonian H = p^2/2 - (ix)^{2n+1} and the mixed Hamiltonian H = (p^2 + x^2)/2 - g(ix)^{2n+1}, which are crypto-Hermitian in a sense that, in spite of apparent complexity of the potential, a quantum spectral problem can be…
For a large region of parameter space involving the cosmological constant and mass parameters, we discuss fluctuating spacetime solutions that are effectively Minkowskian on large time and distance scales. Rapid, small amplitude…
Consider the interior of a black hole or the very early universe: matter is so densely localized that neither the effects of gravity nor those of quantum theory can be ignored. But this entails that neither general relativity nor quantum…
We analyze the pattern of normal modes in linearized Lorentz-violating massive gravity over the 5-dimensional moduli space of mass terms. Ghost-free theories arise at bifurcation points when the ghosts get out of the spectrum of propagating…
The main obstacle in attempts to construct a consistent quantum gravity is the absence of independent flat time. This can in principle be cured by going out to higher dimensions. The modern paradigm assumes that the fundamental theory of…
We classify all the first-order vertices of gravity consistently coupled to a system of 2-form gauge fields by computing the local BRST cohomology H(s|d) in ghost number 0 and form degree n. The consistent deformations are at most linear in…
We investigate the non-perturbative quantization of phantom and ghost degrees of freedom by relating their representations in definite and indefinite inner product spaces. For a large class of potentials, we argue that the same physical…