Related papers: The phantom menaced: constraints on low-energy eff…
The aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
Phantom scalar theories are widely considered in cosmology, but rarely at the quantum level, where they give rise to negative-energy ghost particles. These cause decay of the vacuum into gravitons and photons, violating observational…
We explore the possibility that theories with negative kinetic energy (ghosts) can be meta-stable up to cosmologically long times. In classical mechanics, ghosts undergo spontaneous lockdown rather than run-away if weakly-coupled and…
Phantom fields with negative kinetic energy are often plagued by the vacuum quantum instability in the ultraviolet region. We present a Lorentz-violating dark energy model free from this problem and show that the crossing of the…
Ghost condensation has been recently proposed as a mechanism inducing the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry. Corrections to the Newton potential generated by a static source have been computed: they yield a limit M < 10 MeV on the…
If the observed dark-energy density $\rho_\Lambda$ is interpreted as the net contribution of the energy density of the vacuum, $\rho_\Lambda \equiv \rho_V \sim M_V^4$, and the corresponding vacuum length scale $\lambda_V = M_V^{-1}$ as the…
We consider the branch of the projectable Horava-Lifshitz model which exhibits ghost instabilities in the low energy limit. It turns out that, due to the Lorentz violating structure of the model and to the presence of a finite strong…
The quanta of phantom dark energy models are negative energy particles, whose maximum magnitude of energy $|E|$ must be less than a cutoff $\Lambda\lesssim 20\,$MeV. They are produced by spontaneous decay of the vacuum into phantoms plus…
We present a simple model in which the weak energy condition is violated for spatially homogeneous, slowly evolving fields. The excitations about Lorentz-violating background in Minkowski space do not contain ghosts, tachyons or…
Many theories of modified gravity with higher order derivatives are usually ignored because of serious problems that appear due to an additional ghost degree of freedom. Most dangerously, it causes an immediate decay of the vacuum. However,…
Recent work has shown that non-local modifications of the Einstein equations can have interesting cosmological consequences and can provide a dynamical origin for dark energy, consistent with existing data. At first sight these theories are…
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 explore a dark energy model with a ghost scalar field in the context of the runaway dilaton scenario in low-energy effective string theory. We address the problem of vacuum stability by implementing higher-order derivative terms and show…
The universe's current acceleration is a pretty recent phenomenon in cosmological time scales. This means that the modes that have left our horizon since the beginning of the contemporary acceleration phase, have not really reached the…
We have investigated a cosmological model of a phantom energy with a variable cosmological constant ($\Lambda$) depending on the energy density ($\rho$) as $\Lambda\propto \rho^{-\alpha}$, $\alpha=\rm const.$ and a variable gravitational…
We argue that theories with ghosts may have a long lived vacuum state even if all interactions are Lorentz preserving. In space-time dimension D = 2, we consider the tree level decay rate of the vacuum into ghosts and ordinary particles…
It is suggested that the Minkowski vacuum of quantum field theories of a large number of fields N would be gravitationally unstable due to strong vacuum energy fluctuations unless an N dependent sub-Planckian ultraviolet momentum cutoff is…
We consider late-time cosmology in a (phantom) scalar-tensor theory with an exponential potential, as a dark energy model with equation of state parameter close to -1 (a bit above or below this value). Scalar (and also other kinds of)…
We study a symmetry, schematically Energy -> - Energy, which suppresses matter contributions to the cosmological constant. The requisite negative energy fluctuations are identified with a "ghost" copy of the Standard Model. Gravity…
We suggest that the solution to the cosmological vacuum energy puzzle is linked to the infrared sector of the effective theory of gravity interacting with standard model fields, with QCD fields specifically. We work in the framework of low…