Related papers: Living with Ghosts and their Radiative Corrections
Theories with higher order time derivatives generically suffer from ghost-like instabilities, known as Ostrogradski instabilities. This fate can be avoided by considering "degenerate" Lagrangians, whose kinetic matrix cannot be inverted,…
Most existing theories of dark energy and/or modified gravity, involving a scalar degree of freedom, can be conveniently described within the framework of the Effective Theory of Dark Energy, based on the unitary gauge where the scalar…
A formulation of the linear $\sigma$ model with derivative interactions is studied. The classical theory is on-shell equivalent to the $\sigma$ model with the standard quartic Higgs potential. The mass of the scalar mode only appears in the…
Power-like loop corrections to gauge couplings are a generic feature of higher-dimensional field theories. In supersymmetric grand unified theories in d=5 dimensions, such corrections arise only in the presence of a vacuum expectation value…
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 discuss a supersymmetry breaking mechanism for N = 1 theories triggered by higher dimensional op- erators. We consider such operators for real linear and chiral spinor superfields that break superymmetry and reduce to the Volkov-Akulov…
We address the long-standing ``ghost problem" in higher time-derivative theories (HTDTs), where quantisation typically yields sectors with either unbounded spectra or non-normalisable eigenstates; both rendering the theory unphysical. We…
In this work, we employ renormalization group methods to study the general behavior of field theories possessing anisotropic scaling in the spacetime variables. The Lorentz breaking symmetry that accompanies these models are either soft, if…
The 1-loop effective potential in a scalar theory with quartic interaction on the space $M^{4} \times T^{n}$ for $n=2$ is calculated and is shown to be unbounded from below. This is an indication of a possible instability of the vacuum of…
With an appropriate choice of parameters, a higher derivative theory of gravity can describe a normal massive sector and a ghost massless sector. We show that, when defined on an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime with Dirichlet boundary…
Effective field theories (EFTs) provide a powerful framework to parametrise unknown aspects of possible ultraviolet (UV) physics. For scalar fields in de Sitter space, however, new emergent phenomena can arise when the cut-off scale of the…
We discuss aspects of the hierarchy problem in effective theories with light scalars and a large, physical ultraviolet (UV) cutoff. We make two main points: (1) The (naive) fine-tuning observed in an effective theory does not automatically…
In strongly-coupled theories with no small parameters, there are factors of 4\pi that appear when the couplings of the low-energy effective lagrangian are written in units of the effective cutoff \Lambda. These numerical factors can be…
The full off-shell one loop renormalization for all divergent amplitudes up to dimension 6 in the Abelian Higgs-Kibble model, supplemented with a maximally power counting violating higher-dimensional gauge-invariant derivative interaction…
In this paper, we analyze the constraints imposed by unitarity and crossing symmetry on conformal theories in large dimensions. In particular, we show that in a unitary conformal theory in large dimension $D$, the four-point function of…
We demonstrate how one can construct renormalizable perturbative expansion in formally nonrenormalizable higher dimensional field theories. It is based on $1/N_f$-expansion and results in a logarithmically divergent perturbation theory in…
We study the physics of a single discrete gravitational extra dimension using the effective field theory for massive gravitons. We first consider a minimal discretization with 4D gravitons on the sites and nearest neighbor hopping terms. At…
Dimensional reduction of high temperature field theories improves IR features of their perturbative treatment. A crucial question is, what three-dimensional theory is representing the full system the most faithful way. Careful investigation…
Starting with a choice of a gauge group in four dimensions, there is often freedom in the choice of magnetic and dyonic line operators. Different consistent choices of these operators correspond to distinct physical theories, with the same…
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…