Related papers: Living with Ghosts
Quantum gravity is likely the deepest problem facing current physics. While traditionally associated with short distance nonrenormalizability, it is evident that the long distance problem of unitarity, arising at high energies with black…
The computation of anomalies in quantum field theory may be carried out by evaluating path integral Jacobians, as first shown by Fujikawa. The evaluation of these Jacobians can be cast in the form of a quantum mechanical problem, whose…
We analyze the perturbative implications of the most general high derivative approach to quantum gravity based on a diffeomorphism invariant local action. In particular, we consider the super-renormalizable case with a large number of…
The objective of this thesis is to present a viable extension of general relativity free from cosmological singularities. A viable cosmology, in this sense, is one that is free from ghosts, tachyons or exotic matter, while staying true to…
One of the obstacles to reconciling quantum theory with general relativity, is constructing a theory which is both consistent with observation, and and gives finite answers at high energy, so that the theory holds at arbitrarily short…
We first find the linear approximation of the second plus fourth order derivative massive conformal gravity action. Then we reduce the linearized action to separated second order derivative terms, which allows us to quantize the theory by…
We review how the (absence of) Ostrogradsky instability manifests itself in theories with multiple fields. It has recently been appreciated that when multiple fields are present, the existence of higher derivatives may not automatically…
We encounter these demons on the path towards a UV complete QFT of gravity and a horizonless replacement for black holes. The fate of the ghost is discussed in the strong coupling version of classically-scale-invariant quadratic gravity.…
Close to a saddle-node bifurcation, when two invariant solutions collide and disappear, the behavior of a dynamical system can closely resemble that of a solution which is no longer present at the chosen parameter value. For bifurcating…
We explore the possibility of parity-violating, nonminimally coupled 2-form field theories that retain the same dynamical degrees of freedom as a massive 2-form and thus are ghost-free. Starting from the most general kinetic terms and…
Here, cosmology is obtained from the variable gravitational constant $ G \propto \phi^{-2}$ with $ \phi(x) $ being a scalar and its fluctuations around the ground state. The gravitational action contains Einstein-Hilbert like term with…
We study patterns of quantum entanglement in systems of spins and ghost-spins regarding them as simple quantum mechanical toy models for theories containing negative norm states. We define a single ghost-spin as in arXiv:1602.06505 [hep-th]…
We consider a higher-derivative generalization of disformal transformations in $D$-dimensional spacetime and clarify the conditions under which they form a group with respect to the matrix product and the functional composition. These…
Massive vector fields feature in several areas of particle physics, e.g., as carriers of weak interactions, dark matter candidates, or as an effective description of photons in a plasma. Here we investigate vector fields with…
We study Kerr-Schild perturbations of a ghost-free, generic non-local gravity theory constructed from an infinite series of higher derivative terms in $D$ dimensions. The infinite series of higher derivative terms are encoded by form…
We consider a higher dimensional gravity theory with a negative kinetic energy scalar field and a cosmological constant. We find that the theory admits an exact cosmological solution for the scale factor of our universe. It has the feature…
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…
We propose an algebraic analysis using a 3+1 decomposition to identify conditions for a clever cancellation of the higher derivatives, which plagued the theory with Ostrogradsky ghosts, by exploiting some existing degeneracy in the…
We study the quantization of systems with local particle-ghost symmetries. The systems contain ordinary particles including gauge bosons and their counterparts obeying different statistics. The particle-ghost symmetry is a kind of fermionic…
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…