Related papers: Living with Ghosts and their Radiative Corrections
We discuss the ultraviolet sector of 3+1 dimensional Lifshitz-type anisotropic higher derivative scalar, fermion and gauge field theories, with anisotropy exponent z=3 and with explicit breaking of Lorentz symmetry. By discarding from the…
We consider the 4-fermion scattering amplitude in massless Fermi theory. Based on the Bogolyubov-Parasyuk theorem, which guarantees locality of the counter terms, we derive the recurrence relations for ultraviolet divergences of diagrams…
In order to explore some general features of modified theories of gravity which involve higher derivatives and spontaneous Lorentz and/or diffeomorphism symmetry breaking, we study the recently proposed new version of covariant…
Effective theories are well established theoretical frameworks to describe the effect of energetically widely separated UV models on observables at lower energy scales. Due to the complexity of the effective theory when taking all the…
We study the problem of decoupling of heavy chiral superfields in four-dimensional $N=1$ supersymmetric field theories with Lorentz-invariant and Lorentz-violating higher-derivative terms. We demonstrate that the earlier found effect of…
A discussion of the number of degrees of freedom, and their dynamical properties, in higher-derivative gravitational theories is presented. The complete non-linear sigma model for these degrees of freedom is exhibited using the method of…
Recent perturbative studies show that in 4d non-commutative spaces, the trivial (classically stable) vacuum of gauge theories becomes unstable at the quantum level, unless one introduces sufficiently many fermionic degrees of freedom. This…
We systematically investigate different versions of variational perturbation theory by forcing not only the first or second but also higher derivatives of the approximant with respect to the variational parameter to vanish. The choice of…
The development of instability in the dynamics of theories with higher derivatives is traced in detail in the framework of the Pais-Uhlenbeck fourth oder oscillator. For this aim the external friction force is introduced in the model and…
The structure of the UV divergencies in higher dimensional nonrenormalizable theories is analysed. Based on renormalization operation and renormalization group theory it is shown that even in this case the leading divergencies (asymptotics)…
We present weighted covariant derivatives and wave operators for perturbations of certain algebraically special Einstein spacetimes in arbitrary dimensions, under which the Teukolsky and related equations become weighted wave equations. We…
We argue that theories with ghosts may have a long lived vacuum state even if all interactions are Lorentz preserving. In space-time dimension D = 2, we consider the tree level decay rate of the vacuum into ghosts and ordinary particles…
We consider a family of $\kappa$-Poincar\'e invariant scalar field theories on 4-d $\kappa$-Minkowski space with quartic orientable interaction, that is for which $\phi$ and its conjugate $\phi^\dag$ alternate in the quartic interaction,…
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 construct the effective field theory for a single massive higher-spin particle in flat spacetime. Positivity bounds of the S-matrix force the cutoff of the theory to be well below the naive strong-coupling scale, forbid any potential and…
By imposing the weighted renormalization condition and the (super)symmetry requirements, we construct a Lifshitz-like extension of the three-dimensional Wess-Zumino model, with dynamical critical exponent z=2. In this context, the auxiliary…
A stochastic process with self-interaction as a model of quantum field theory is studied. We consider an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck stochastic process x(t) with interaction of the form x^{(\alpha)}(t)^4, where $\alpha$ indicates the fractional…
We consider the cosmological application of Lee-Wick theory where a field has a higher derivative kinetic operators. The higher derivative term can be eliminated by introducing a set of auxiliary fields. We investigate the cosmological…
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…
Quantum field theories (QFTs) including fourth-derivative terms such as the Lee-Wick finite QED and quadratic gravity have a better ultra-violet behavior compared to standard theories with second-derivative ones, but the existence of ghost…