Related papers: Can MAG be a predictive EFT? Radiative Stability a…
We disprove the widespread belief that higher order curvature theories of gravity in the metric-affine formalism are generally ghost-free. This is clarified by considering a sub-class of theories constructed only with the Ricci tensor and…
We compute the one-loop quantum corrections to the potential of ghost-free massive gravity. We show how the mass of external matter fields contribute to the running of the cosmological constant, but do not change the ghost-free structure of…
We reassess foundational aspects of Metric-Affine Gravity (MAG) in light of the Dressing Field Method, a tool allowing to systematically build gauge-invariant field variables. To get MAG started, one has to deal with the problem of "gauge…
If the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves is measured in the near-future, what could it tell us about bigravity? To address this question, we study massive bigravity theories by focusing on a region in parameter space which is safe…
Spontaneous scalarization is a mechanism that allows a scalar field to go undetected in weak gravity environments and yet develop a nontrivial configuration in strongly gravitating systems. At the perturbative level it manifests as a…
We explore how the stability of metric perturbations in higher derivative theories of gravity depends on the energy scale of initial seeds of such perturbations and on a typical energy scale of the gravitational vacuum background. It is…
We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for twisted…
In the context of Lorentz-invariant massive gravity we show that classical solutions around heavy sources are plagued by ghost instabilities. The ghost shows up in the effective field theory at huge distances from the source, much bigger…
We prove that many cosmological models characterized by vectors nonminimally coupled to the curvature (such as the Turner-Widrow mechanism for the production of magnetic fields during inflation, and models of vector inflation or vector…
The nature of the classical canonical phase-space variables for gravity suggests that the associated quantum field operators should obey affine commutation relations rather than canonical commutation relations. Prior to the introduction of…
The inclusion of higher derivatives is a necessary condition for a renormalizable or superrenormalizable local theory of quantum gravity. On the other hand, higher derivatives lead to classical instabilities and a loss of unitarity at the…
We investigate ghost-free vector-tensor theories in metric-affine geometry. In all of our analysis, we start with the Lagrangian containing up to quadratic terms of first-order derivatives of a vector field. To obtain ghost-free…
We offer a discussion on the strong field regime predictions of two families of theories that deviate from General Relativity in different aspects: $f(R)$-gravity and Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG). We discuss astrophysical effects in…
Models with vector fields acquiring a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value along one spatial direction have been proposed to sustain a prolonged stage of anisotropic accelerated expansion. Such models have been used for realizations of…
We investigate the problems of ghosts and stability in the framework of asymptotical safe theory of gravity in the Minkowski background. Within one loop corrections, we obtain explicitly the constraints on the coupling parameters. Applying…
Massive vector fields feature in several areas of particle physics, e.g., as carriers of weak interactions, dark matter candidates, or as an effective description of photons in a plasma. Here we investigate vector fields with…
An inspection of the precise geometric constructions underlying fundamental notions in quantum gauge field theories sheds light on various aspects which tend to be obscured in the usual formalisms. Revising the notions of mutually…
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 review the interpretation of gauge invariance as a mathematical redundancy required in a relativistic description of forces mediated by massless spin-1 and spin-2 particles. In this context we also review the Weinberg-Witten theorem and…
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…