Related papers: Infra-red enhanced loops in quadratic gravity
Several recent papers discuss gravitational corrections to gauge couplings that depend quadratically on the energy. In the framework of the background-field approach, these correspond in general to adding to the effective action terms…
4-derivative gravity provides a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity at the price of introducing a physical ghost, which could admit a sensible positive-energy quantization. To understand its physics, we compute ghost-mediated…
We study loop corrections to positivity bounds on effective field theories in the context of $2\to 2$ scattering in gravitational theories, in the presence of light particles. It has been observed that certain negative contributions at low…
Gauge theories and perturbative gravity in four dimensions are governed by a tower of infinite-dimensional symmetries which arise from tree-level soft theorems. However, aside from the leading soft theorems which are all-loop exact,…
The freedom one has in constructing locally gauge invariant charged fields in gauge theories is analyzed in full detail and exploited to construct, in QED, an electron field whose two-point function W(p), up to the fourth order in the…
Exact superstring solutions are constructed in 4-D space-time, with positive curvature and non-trivial dilaton and antisymmetric tensor fields. The full spectrum of string excitations is derived as a function of moduli fields $T^{i}$ and…
We revisit the renormalization of the gauge coupling in massless QED coupled to a scaleless quadratic theory of gravity. We compare two alternative prescriptions for the running of the electric charge: (i) the conventional $\mu$-running in…
We review an approach developed in the last few years by our group in which GR is modified in the infrared, at an effective level, by nonlocal terms associated to a mass scale. We begin by recalling the notion of quantum effective action…
More than three decades ago quadratic gravity was found to present a perturbative, renormalizable and asymptotically free theory of quantum gravity. Unfortunately the theory appeared to have problems with a spin-2 ghost. In this essay we…
We investigate energy correlators in four-dimensional gravitational theories, which provide a simple class of infrared-finite observables. We compute the one- and two-point energy correlators at one loop in $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity and…
Quadratic gravity is a well-motivated extension of general relativity~(GR) wherein the Einstein-Hilbert action is augmented by quadratic curvature terms. This theory is equivalent to GR in an effective-field-theory framework, while the two…
It is well known that the correlation functions of a scalar field in a quasi-de Sitter space exhibit at the loop level cumulative infra-red effects proportional to the total number of e-foldings of inflation. Using the in-in formalism, we…
In this work, we derive the linearised equations of quadratic gravity from entanglement equilibrium of local causal diamonds. Rather than starting from the Wald entropy prescription (which depends on the gravitational Lagrangian), we employ…
We argue that the well-known beta functions of quadratic gravity do not correspond to the physical dependence of scattering amplitudes on external momenta, and derive the correct physical beta functions. Asymptotic freedom turns out to be…
We give a review of the one-loop divergences in higher derivative gravity theories. We first make the bilinear expansion in the quantum fluctuation on arbitrary backgrounds, introduce a higher-derivative gauge fixing and show that…
We consider a multiplicatively renormalizable higher-derivative scalar theory which is used as an effective theory for quantum gravity at large distances (infrared phase of quantum gravity). The asymptotic regimes (in particular, the…
We present the analytic form of the two-loop four-graviton scattering amplitudes in Einstein gravity. To remove ultraviolet divergences we include counterterms quadratic and cubic in the Riemann curvature tensor. The two-loop numerical…
A recent proposal for gauge-invariant observables in inflation [R. Brunetti et al., JHEP 1608 (2016) 032] is examined. We give a generalisation of their construction to general background spacetimes. In flat space, we calculate one-loop…
Based on the stochastic gravity, we study the loop corrections to the scalar and tensor perturbations during inflation. Since the loop corrections to scalar perturbations suffer infrared (IR) divergence, we consider the IR regularization to…
Chiral effective field theories have been used with success in the study of nuclear structure. It is of interest to systematically improve these energy functionals (particularly that of quantum hadrodynamics) through the inclusion of…