Related papers: Bound States in Lee's Complex Ghost Model
Theories described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians are known to possess strictly positive energy eigenvalues and exhibit unitary time evolution if the Hamiltonian is symmetric under discrete parity and time (PT) transformation. In this work,…
The holographic principle implies that quantum field theory overcounts the number of independent degrees of freedom in quantum gravity. An argument due to Cohen, Kaplan, and Nelson (CKN) suggests that the number of degrees of freedom…
Generic higher derivative theories are believed to be fundamentally unphysical because they contain Ostrogradsky ghosts. We show that within complex classical mechanics it is possible to construct higher derivative theories that circumvent…
We investigate the relationship between nonlocal and local quantum field theories, and search for a viable notion of "local limit" to relate the unitary models. In Euclidean space it is relatively easy to have nonlocal theories with…
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 consider a non-Abelian Lee--Wick gauge theory and discuss Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) invariance. It contains fourth-order derivative as extensions of the kinetic term, leading to massive ghosts in the theory upon quantization. We…
We address the long-standing ``ghost problem" in higher time-derivative theories (HTDTs), where quantisation typically yields sectors with either unbounded spectra or non-normalisable eigenstates; both rendering the theory unphysical. We…
In this paper we study perturbatively an extension of the Stelle higher derivative gravity involving an infinite number of derivative terms. We know that the usual quadratic action is renormalizable but is not unitary because of the…
It is shown that polynomial gravity theories with more than four derivatives in each scalar and tensor sectors have a regular weak-field limit, without curvature singularities. This is achieved by proving that in these models the effect of…
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…
The dressed propagator of a ghost coupled to ordinary fields develops a pair of complex conjugate poles in the first Riemann sheet above the multi-particle threshold. We study the implications of this pole structure for the asymptotic field…
Zeta-function regularization is applied to complete a recent analysis of the quantized electromagnetic field in the presence of boundaries. The quantum theory is studied by setting to zero on the boundary the magnetic field, the…
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…
We revisit the framework of Newer General Relativity, defined by all independent quadratic invariants of the non-metricity tensor, including the unique quadratic parity-violating term. We analyze linear perturbations around a flat FLRW…
A crucial problem in quantum cosmology is a careful analysis of the one-loop semiclassical approximation for the wave function of the universe, after an appropriate choice of mixed boundary conditions. The results for Euclidean quantum…
We study the metric perturbations around the de Sitter and Minkowski backgrounds in Conformal Gravity. We confirm the presence of ghosts in both cases. In the de Sitter case, by applying the Maldacena boundary conditions - the Neumann…
We analyze the pattern of normal modes in linearized Lorentz-violating massive gravity over the 5-dimensional moduli space of mass terms. Ghost-free theories arise at bifurcation points when the ghosts get out of the spectrum of propagating…
We consider a renormalizable two-dimensional model of dilaton gravity coupled to a set of conformal fields as a toy model for quantum cosmology. We discuss the cosmological solutions of the model and study the effect of including the…
In the context of perturbative quantum field theory, the addition of quadratic-curvature invariants to the Einstein-Hilbert action makes it possible to achieve strict renormalizability in four dimensions. The additional terms $R^2$ and…
Ghost fields in quantum field theory have been a long-standing problem. Specifically, theories with higher derivatives involve ghosts that appear in the Hamiltonian in the form of linear momenta term, which is commonly known as the…