Related papers: Benign vs malicious ghosts in higher-derivative th…
A brief review of the physics of systems including higher derivatives in the Lagrangian is given. All such systems involve ghosts, i.e. the spectrum of the Hamiltonian is not bounded from below and the vacuum ground state is absent. Usually…
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…
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 discuss exactly solvable systems involving integrals of motion with higher powers of momenta. If one of these integrals is chosen for the Hamiltonian, we obtain a higher-derivative system involving ghosts, i.e. a system whose Hamiltonian…
Understanding the role of higher derivatives is probably one of the most relevant questions in quantum gravity theory. Already at the semiclassical level, when gravity is a classical background for quantum matter fields, the action of…
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 show a new class of interaction terms with higher derivatives that can be added to every low derivative real scalar, such that the theory is degenerate, and the equation of motion remains of second order. In contrast to previous setups,…
Perturbation theory for gravity in dimensions greater than two requires higher derivatives in the free action. Higher derivatives seem to lead to ghosts, states with negative norm. We consider a fourth order scalar field theory and show…
We present a simple class of mechanical models where a canonical degree of freedom interacts with another one with a negative kinetic term, i.e. with a ghost. We prove analytically that the classical motion of the system is completely…
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…
Negative kinetic energies correspond to ghost degrees of freedom, which are potentially of relevance for cosmology, quantum gravity, and high energy physics. We present a novel wide class of stable mechanical systems where a positive energy…
We consider finite and infinite-dimensional ghost-ridden dynamical systems whose Hamiltonians involve non positive definite kinetic terms. We point out the existence of three classes of such systems where the ghosts are benign, i.e. systems…
The inclusion of higher derivatives is a necessary condition for a renormalizable or superrenormalizable local theory of quantum gravity. On the other hand, higher derivatives lead to classical instabilities and a loss of unitarity at the…
We argue that Lee-Wick's complex ghost appearing in any higher derivative theory is stable and its asymptotic field exists. It may be more appropriate to call it ``anti-unstable" in the sense that, the more the ghost `decays' into lighter…
Usually when applying the mimetic model to the early universe, higher derivative terms are needed to promote the mimetic field to be dynamical. However such models suffer from the ghost and/or the gradient instabilities and simple…
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…
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…
We investigate three-form gauge theories with higher derivative interactions and their supersymmetric extensions in four space-time dimensions. For the bosonic three-form gauge theories, we show that derivatives on the field strength of the…
We construct a supersymmetric (1+1)-dimensional field theory involving extra derivatives and associated ghosts: the spectrum of the Hamiltonian is not bounded from below, neither from above. In spite of that, there is neither classical, nor…
We explicitly show that general local higher-derivative theories with only complex conjugate ghosts and normal real particles are unitary at any perturbative order in the loop expansion. The proof presented here relies on integrating the…