Related papers: Non-perturbative materialization of ghosts
Ghost imaging is the remarkable process where an image can be formed from photons that have not "seen" the object. Traditionally this phenomenon has required initially correlated but spatially separated photons, e.g., one to interact with…
We study the gravitational collapse of a dust dark matter star in a $\Lambda$-background. We consider two distinct cases: First we do not have a dark matter and dark energy coupling; second, we consider that $\Lambda $ decay in dark…
We study the negative modes of gravitational instantons representing vacuum decay in asymptotically flat space-time. We consider two different vacuum decay scenarios: the Coleman-de Luccia $\mathrm{O}(4)$-symmetric bubble, and…
We present a systematic and unifying treatment of the problem of spontaneous nucleation of particle-antiparticle pairs in a (2+1)-dimensional system due to a static and uniform electromagnetic-like field, in the presence of quantum…
We show that the ghost degrees of freedom of Einstein gravity with a Weyl term can be eliminated by a simple mechanism that invokes local Lorentz symmetry breaking. We demonstrate how the mechanism works in a cosmological setting. The…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
Motivated by some recent speculative attempts to model the dark energy, scalar fields with negative kinetic energy coupled to gravity without a cosmological constant are considered. It is shown that in the presence of an ordinary fluid, any…
Recently, several works have investigated the coupling to matter in ghost-free massive (bi-&multi-)gravity and a new effective coupling to matter has been proposed. In this note we clarify some confusion on the existence and the…
The existence of light hidden sectors is an exciting possibility that may be tested in the near future. If DM is allowed to decay into such a hidden sector through GUT suppressed operators, it can accommodate the recent cosmic ray…
In the recently proposed non-local theory of quantum gravity one can avoid massive tensor ghosts at the tree level by a special choice of the non-local form factor between the two Ricci tensors. We show that at the quantum level this theory…
Matter is coupled to three-dimensional gravity such that the topological phase is allowed and the (anti-) de Sitter or Poincar\'e symmetry remains intact. Spontaneous symmetry breaking to the Lorentz group occurs if a scalar field is…
We consider new instantons that appear as a result of accounting for quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations naturally regularize the O(4) singular solutions abandoned in Coleman's theory. In the previous works [3,4] we showed how new…
Violent cosmic events, from black hole mergers to stellar collapses, often leave behind highly excited black hole remnants that inevitably relax to equilibrium. The prevailing view, developed over decades, holds that this relaxation is…
Coleman-de Luccia transitions are spontaneous processes of nucleation of bubbles within metastable gravitational vacua including in their interior a true stable vacuum. From the perspective of lower-dimensional gauged supergravities…
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…
We present a unifying treatment of dark energy and modified gravity that allows distinct conformal-disformal couplings of matter species to the gravitational sector. In this very general approach, we derive the conditions to avoid ghost and…
In gravitational thermodynamics, the entropy of a black hole with distinct surface gravities can be evaluated in a microcanonical ensemble. At the $WKB$ level, the entropy becomes the negative of the Euclidean action of the constrained…
We investigate and classify the possible types of false vacuum bubbles in Einstein gravity. The false vacuum bubbles can occur only if gravity is taken into account. We show that there exist solutions only with compact geometries. The…
Special gravity refers to interacting theories of massless gravitons in Minkowski space-time which are invariant under the abelian gauge invariance $h_{ab}\rightarrow h_{ab}+\partial_{(a}\chi_{b)}$ only. In this article we determine the…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We introduce a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum…