Related papers: Living with Ghosts
In this work we develop a theoretical framework for Gauss-Bonnet modified gravity theories, in which ghost modes can be eliminated at the equations of motion level. Particularly, after we present how the ghosts can occur at the level of…
We discuss spacetime instability for effective field theories of quantum gravity. The effective action of gravity introduces infinite higher derivative curvature terms $R^{2}, { R }_{ \mu \nu }{ R }^{ \mu \nu }, R_{\mu\nu\kappa\lambda}…
We consider the anomalies of $W_\infty$ gravity in the context of path-integralquantization. We derive the ghost-loop anomalies to all orders in $\hbar$ directly from the path-integral measure by the Fujikawa method. We also show that in…
In unified field theories with more than four dimensions, the form of the equations of physics in spacetime depends in general on the choice of coordinates in higher dimensions. The reason is that the group of coordinate transformations in…
We study cosmological perturbations for a ghost free massive gravity theory formulated with a dynamical extra metric that is needed to massive deform GR. In this formulation FRW background solutions fall in two branches. In the dynamics of…
The stability of higher-order time derivative theories using the polymer extension of quantum mechanics is studied. First, we focus on the well-known Pais-Uhlenbeck model and by casting the theory into the sum of two decoupled The…
Recent determinations of the equation of state of dark energy hint that this may well be of the phantom type, i.e., $w_{de} < -1$. If confirmed by future experiments, this would strongly point to the existence of fields that violate the…
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…
A novel theory of Quantum Gravity is presented in which the real gravitons manifest themselves as holes in space. In general, these holes propagate at the speed of light through an expanding universe with boundary denoted by U, which is…
We present a novel way to constrain the ghost field with respect to other physical fields present in a given theory such that the theory becomes quantizable. This is achieved by imposing positivity of the total kinetic energy of the system…
We investigate the non-Pauli-Fierz(nPF) theory, a linearized massive gravity with a generic graviton mass term, which has been ignored due to a ghost in its spectrum and the resultant loss of unitarity. We first show that it is possible to…
The present letter considers the quantization method developed in [1]-[9], which postulates that, in several situations, negative norm or ghost states can be avoided in order to give positive probabilities. These authors also postulate a…
In order to assess the role of ghosts in cosmology, we study the evolution of linear cosmological perturbations during inflation when a Weyl term is added to the action. Our main result is that vector perturbations can no longer be ignored…
We consider the effect of quantum interactions on Pauli-Fierz massive gravity. With generic graviton cubic interactions, we observe that the 1-loop counterterms do not conform to the tree level structure of Pauli-Fierz action, resulting in…
We analyze the first-order formulation of the ghost-free bigravity model in three-dimensions known as zwei-dreibein gravity. For a special choice of parameters, it was argued to have an additional gauge symmetry and give rise to a partially…
We investigate cosmological scenarios with a non-minimal derivative coupling between the scalar field and the curvature, examining both the quintessence and the phantom cases in zero and constant potentials. In general, we find that the…
We review results on small-data global stability and highlight their applicability to classical interacting scalar fields with opposite-sign kinetic terms (ghosts). Further, we present a one-parameter family of numerical scattering…
We investigate the classical stability of two coupled scalar fields with opposite-sign kinetic terms evolving in 1+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime. In the first part, we characterise unquenched ghostly interactions and present numerical…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity extended with Ricci polynomials and derive the constraints on the coupling constants from the considerations of being ghost free, exhibiting an $a$-theorem and maintaining causality. The salient…
We study cosmological perturbations in mimetic matter scenario with a general higher derivative function. We calculate the quadratic action and show that both the kinetic term and the gradient term have the wrong sings. We perform the…