Related papers: Can MAG be a predictive EFT? Radiative Stability a…
We introduce a `proper time' formalism to study the instability of the vacuum in a uniform external electric field due to particle production. This formalism allows us to reduce a quantum field theoretical problem to a quantum-mechanical…
Gravitational wave `echoes' during black-hole merging events have been advocated as possible signals of modifications to gravity in the strong-field (but semiclassical) regime. In these proposals the observable effect comes entirely from…
The effective field theory of massive gravity had long been formulated in a generally covariant way arXiv:hep-th/0210184. Using this formalism, it has been found recently that there exists a class of massive nonlinear theories that are free…
We study the stability of theories where the gravitational action has arbitrary algebraic dependence on the three first traces of the Riemann tensor: the Ricci tensor, the co-Ricci tensor, and the homothetic curvature tensor. We…
We study properties of a recently proposed regularisation scheme to formulate the initial value problem for general (relativistic) effective field theories (EFTs) with arbitrary higher order equations of motion. We consider a simple UV…
In this paper, we discuss the existence of ghost star models in the Einstein-Maxwell framework. In order to explore these objects, we put forward the idea of Zeldovich and Novikov by keeping in mind that the energy density of such models…
Theories such as massive Galileons and massive gravity can satisfy the presently known improved positivity bounds provided they are weakly coupled. We discuss the form of the EFT Lagrangian for a weakly coupled UV completion of massive…
We introduce new techniques that can preserve unitarity of the system including ghost particles. Negative norms of the particles can be involved in zero-norm states by constraints of the physical space. These are useful to apply the…
We study quantized Yang-Mills theory with massive vector fields in the framework of causal perturbation theory. The most general form of the interaction which is invariant under operator gauge transformations is pointed out. The generator…
We present a new understanding of the unstable ghost-like resonance which appears in theories such as quadratic gravity and Lee-Wick type theories. Quantum corrections make this resonance unstable, such that it does not appear in the…
Performing Hamiltonian analysis of the massive gravity [9] in full phase space, we see that the theory is ghost free. We also see in a more clear way that this result is intrinsic of the interaction term and does not depend on the variables…
We demonstrate how masses of new states, beyond direct experimental reach, could nevertheless be extracted in the framework of effective field theory (EFT), given broad assumptions on the underlying UV physics, however not sticking to a…
We complete the construction of vacuum string field theory by proposing a canonical choice of ghost kinetic term -- a local insertion of the ghost field at the string midpoint with an infinite normalization. This choice, supported by level…
We consider the problem of removing the divergences in an arbitrary gauge-field theory (possibly nonrenormalizable). We show that this can be achieved by performing, order by order in the loop expansion, a redefinition of some parameters…
We develop the effective field theory (EFT) of perturbations in the context of scalar-tensor theories with a spacelike scalar profile on arbitrary black hole backgrounds. Our construction of the EFT is based on the fact that in the unitary…
We propose a reformulation of electrodynamics in terms of a {\it physical} vector potential entirely free of gauge ambiguities. Quantizing the theory leads to a propagator that is gauge invariant by construction in this reformulation, 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…
In this work we shall address the ghost issue of $F\left( R,\mathcal{G} \right)$ gravity, which is known to be plagued with ghost degrees of freedom. These ghosts occur due to the presence of higher than two derivatives in the field…
Infrared modifications of gravity have been proposed over the years as potentially useful phenomenological models. Massive (multi)-gravity is an interesting class of such theories. The true nature and the ultimate consistency of many of…
In this work we explore the viability of nonminimally coupled matter- curvature gravity theories, namely the conditions required for the absence of tachyon instabilities and ghost degrees of freedom. We contrast our finds with recent claims…