Related papers: Is negative kinetic energy meta-stable?
We present a simple class of mechanical models where a canonical degree of freedom interacts with another one with a negative kinetic term, i.e. with a ghost. We prove analytically that the classical motion of the system is completely…
Negative kinetic energies correspond to ghost degrees of freedom, which are potentially of relevance for cosmology, quantum gravity, and high energy physics. We present a novel wide class of stable mechanical systems where a positive energy…
The energy in the ghost-free massive gravity theory is calculated via explicitly resolving the initial value constraints for spherically symmetric deformations of flat space. It turns out that the energy is positive in some cases, but in…
We explore the nonlinear dynamics of classical field theories containing ghost degrees of freedom, focusing on two coupled scalar fields with opposite kinetic terms in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Using a spacetime…
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 perturbations about a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background in Chern-Simons gravity. At large momenta one of the two circularly polarized tensor modes becomes ghostlike. We argue that nevertheless the theory does not exhibit…
Recent work has shown that non-local modifications of the Einstein equations can have interesting cosmological consequences and can provide a dynamical origin for dark energy, consistent with existing data. At first sight these theories are…
The aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
Ghost fields have reemerged in a handful of phenomenologically motivated cosmological and particle physics scenarios, and most recently in a cyclic mechanism to address the fine-tuning of gauge couplings in the standard model. We study the…
We review some of the recent results which can be useful for better understanding of the problem of stability of vacuum and in general classical solutions in higher derivative quantum gravity. The fourth derivative terms in the purely…
Ghost condensation has been recently proposed as a mechanism inducing the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry. Corrections to the Newton potential generated by a static source have been computed: they yield a limit M < 10 MeV on the…
In a recently proposed model of ``ghost condensation'', spatially homogeneous states may mix, via tunneling, with inhomogeneous states which are somewhat similar to bubbles in the theory of false vacuum decay, the corresponding bubble…
Phantom fields with negative kinetic energy are often plagued by the vacuum quantum instability in the ultraviolet region. We present a Lorentz-violating dark energy model free from this problem and show that the crossing of the…
Understanding the role of higher derivatives is probably one of the most relevant questions in quantum gravity theory. Already at the semiclassical level, when gravity is a classical background for quantum matter fields, the action of…
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…
We investigate the classical stability of two coupled scalar fields with opposite-sign kinetic terms evolving in 1+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime. In the first part, we characterise unquenched ghostly interactions and present numerical…
We consider cosmological models with a dynamical dark energy field, and study the presence of three types of commonly found instabilities, namely ghost (when fields have negative kinetic energy), gradient (negative momentum squared) and…
Recent LHC results concerning the mass of the Higgs boson indicate that the vacuum in our Universe may be unstable. We analyze properties of unstable vacuum states from the point of view of the quantum theory of unstable states. From the…
We explore a dark energy model with a ghost scalar field in the context of the runaway dilaton scenario in low-energy effective string theory. We address the problem of vacuum stability by implementing higher-order derivative terms and show…
We consider the kinematical and dynamical evolution of Friedmann universes with a mixture of non-interacting matter and a ghost-like field, in a scenario analogous to that advocated by the Quintom model. Assuming that the conventional…