Related papers: Ghosts without runaway
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…
We explore the possibility that theories with negative kinetic energy (ghosts) can be meta-stable up to cosmologically long times. In classical mechanics, ghosts undergo spontaneous lockdown rather than run-away if weakly-coupled and…
We consider finite and infinite-dimensional ghost-ridden dynamical systems whose Hamiltonians involve non positive definite kinetic terms. We point out the existence of three classes of such systems where the ghosts are benign, i.e. systems…
We discuss exactly solvable systems involving integrals of motion with higher powers of momenta. If one of these integrals is chosen for the Hamiltonian, we obtain a higher-derivative system involving ghosts, i.e. a system whose Hamiltonian…
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…
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…
We quantize a classically stable system of a harmonic oscillator polynomially coupled to a ghost with negative kinetic energy. We prove that due to an integral of motion with a positive discrete spectrum: i) the Hamiltonian has a pure point…
We consider the simplest nontrivial supersymmetric quantum mechanical system involving higher derivatives. We unravel the existence of additional bosonic and fermionic integrals of motion forming a nontrivial algebra. This allows one to…
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 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…
Interacting theories with higher derivatives involve ghosts. They correspond to instabilities that display themselves at the classical level. We notice that comparatively "benign" mechanical higher-derivative systems exist where the…
We present a new method to analytically prove global stability in ghost-ridden dynamical systems. Our proposal encompasses all prior results and consequentially extends them. In particular, we show that stability can follow from a conserved…
We prove an exact quantum conservation law for a harmonic oscillator coupled to a ghost degree of freedom: a second classical conserved quantity lifts to a quantum operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian with no hbar corrections,…
Preservation of coherence is a fundamental yet subtle phenomenon in open systems. We uncover its relation to symmetries respected by the system Hamiltonian and its coupling to the environment. We discriminate between local and global…
We review results on small-data global stability and highlight their applicability to classical interacting scalar fields with opposite-sign kinetic terms (ghosts). Further, we present a one-parameter family of numerical scattering…
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 observe that a wide class of higher-derivative systems admits a bounded integral of motion that ensures the classical stability of dynamics, while the canonical energy is unbounded. We use the concept of a Lagrange anchor to demonstrate…
We show that a class of nonlocal gravity models, proposed to explain current cosmic acceleration without dark energy, passes two major tests: First, they can be defined so as not to alter the, observationally correct, general relativity…
We investigate the stability of theories in which Lorentz invariance is spontaneously broken by fixed-norm vector "aether" fields. Models with generic kinetic terms are plagued either by ghosts or by tachyons, and are therefore physically…
We give a simple discussion of ghosts, unitarity violation, negative norm states and quantum vs classical behavior in the simplest model with four derivative action - the Pais-Uhlenbeck oscillator. We also point out that the normalizable…