Related papers: Unitary Quadratic Quantum Gravity in 4D
The quadratic theory of gravity is the unique renormalizable theory of quantum gravity in 4 dimensions, as proved by K. S. Stelle in 1977. Over the decades, the theory has been understood to contain a massive tensor ghost, and several…
Here we prove unitarity of the recently found fourth-order self-dual model of spin-2 by investigating the analytic structure of its propagator. The model describes massive particles of helicity +2 (or -2) in $D=2+1$ and corresponds to the…
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…
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…
Quadratic gravity is a fourth-order (in derivatives) theory that can serve as an attractive upgrade to the standard description of gravity provided by General Relativity, thanks to its renormalizability and its built-in description of…
Quadratic gravity presents us with a renormalizable, asymptotically free theory of quantum gravity. When its couplings grow strong at some scale, as in QCD, then this strong scale sets the Planck mass. QCD has a gluon that does not appear…
In the framework of asymptotic safety, we study quantum quadratic gravity in the presence of the Higgs field considered as non-separable from the vacuum. The theory flows to a high energy fixed point where the Higgs field is strongly…
We discuss a variation of quadratic gravity in which the gravitational interaction remains weakly coupled at all energies, but is assisted by a Yang-Mills gauge theory which becomes strong at the Planck scale. The Yang-Mills interaction is…
We perform a canonical quantization of Weyl's conformal gravity by means of the covariant operator formalism and investigate the unitarity of the resulting quantum theory. After reducing the originally fourth order theory to second order in…
We study the creation and evolution of cosmological perturbations in renormalizable quadratic gravity with a Weyl term. We adopt a prescription that implies the stability of the vacuum at the price of introducing a massive spin-two ghost…
We study the particle spectrum and the unitarity of the generic n-dimensional Weyl-invariant quadratic curvature gravity theories around their (anti-)de Sitter [(A)dS] and flat vacua. Weyl symmetry is spontaneously broken in (A)dS and…
In this paper we study the spectrum of all conformal, ${\cal N}$-extended supergravities (${\cal N}=1,2,3,4$) in four space-time dimensions. When these theories are obtained as massless limit of Einstein plus Weyl$^2$supergravity, the…
We present an effective four-dimensional formulation of the laws of gravity that respects the main features of a higher (five)-dimensional scenario of Randall-Sundrum type. The geometrical structure of the theory is that of a…
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…
We obtain the matter-graviton scattering amplitude in the gravitational theory of quadratic curvature, which has $R_{\mu\nu}^2$ term in the action. Unitarity bound is not satisfied because of the existence of negative norm states, while an…
We explicitly compute the tree-level on-shell four-graviton amplitudes in four, five and six dimensions for local and weakly nonlocal gravitational theories that are quadratic in both, the Ricci and scalar curvature with form factors of the…
In Article I, a harmonic-oscillator model of a universe of n quarks is infinitesimally modified to eliminate the background reference frame. As a result, quark trajectories exhibit the unification of gravity and the harmonic oscillator near…
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…
Motivated by quantum gravity on spacetimes with multi-scale geometry, we analyze quantum field theories with a self-adjoint fractional power $(\Box^2)^{\gamma/2}$ of the d'Alem\-bert\-ian in the kinetic term, for any real $\gamma>0$.…
We use conformal, but ghostful, Weyl gravity to study its ghost-free, second derivative, partially massless (PM) spin 2 component in presence of Einstein gravity with positive cosmological constant. Specifically, we consider both…