Related papers: Superluminality and UV Completion
One may believe that front velocities of waves in a given theory coincide with the UV limit of phase velocities for any dispersion relations. This implies that IR physics is irrelevant to the discussion of propagation speed of waves. We…
Vacuum polarisation in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which effectively violate the strong equivalence principle and affect the propagation of light. In the low frequency limit, Drummond and Hathrell have shown…
The effective actions describing the low-energy dynamics of QFTs involving gravity generically exhibit causality violations. These may take the form of superluminal propagation or Shapiro time advances and allow the construction of "time…
It is now well-known that vacuum polarisation in QED can lead to superluminal low-frequency phase velocities for photons propagating in curved spacetimes. In a series of papers, we have shown that this quantum phenomenon is dispersive and…
It has been known for a long time that vacuum polarization in QED leads to a superluminal low-frequency phase velocity for light propagating in curved spacetime. Assuming the validity of the Kramers-Kronig dispersion relation, this would…
Within the low-energy effective field theories of QED and gravity, the low-energy speed of light or that of gravitational waves can typically be mildly superluminal in curved spacetimes. Related to this, small scattering time advances…
Positivity bounds - constraints on any low-energy effective field theory imposed by the fundamental axioms of unitarity, causality and locality in the UV - have recently been used to constrain scalar-tensor theories of dark energy. However,…
We show how uncertainty in the causal structure of field theory is essentially inevitable when one includes quantum gravity. This includes the fact that lightcones are ill-defined in such a theory. This effect is small in the effective…
Principles are central to physical reasoning, particularly in the search for a theory of quantum gravity (QG), where novel empirical data is lacking. One principle widely adopted in the search for QG is UV completion: the idea that a theory…
It has been often conjectured that the correct theory of quantum gravity will act as a UV regulator in the low energy limit of quantum field theory. Earlier work has shown that if the path integral defining the quantum field theory…
Any theory of quantum gravity must ultimately be connected to observations. This demand is difficult to be met due to the high energies at which we expect the quantum nature of gravity to become manifest. Here we study, how viable quantum…
Local superluminal photon propagation arises at $\mathcal{O}(\alpha/m_e^2)$ in the Drummond Hathrell (DH) effective action obtained by integrating out the electron in QED coupled to gravity. Whether such superluminality implies a genuine…
Physical principles such as unitarity, causality, and locality can constrain the space of consistent effective field theories (EFTs) by imposing two-sided bounds on the allowed values of Wilson coefficients. In this paper, we consider the…
For a low energy effective theory to admit a standard local, unitary, analytic and Lorentz-invariant UV completion, its scattering amplitudes must satisfy certain inequalities. While these bounds are known in the forward limit for real…
Low-energy effective field theories containing a light scalar field are used extensively in cosmology, but often there is a tension between embedding such theories in a healthy UV completion and achieving a phenomenologically viable…
A new attempt is demonstrated that QFTs can be UV finite if they are viewed as the low energy effective theories of a fundamental underlying theory (that is complete and well-defined in all respects) according to the modern standard point…
In QFT, the null energy condition (NEC) for a classical field configuration is usually associated with that configuration's stability against small perturbations, and with the sub-luminality of these. Here, we exhibit an effective field…
Assuming the existence of a local, analytic, unitary UV completion in a Poincar\'{e} invariant scalar field theory with a mass gap, we derive an infinite number of positivity requirements using the known properties of the amplitude at and…
A number of general issues relating to superluminal photon propagation in gravitational fields are explored. The possibility of superluminal, yet causal, photon propagation arises because of Equivalence Principle violating interactions…
We derive positivity bounds on low energy effective field theories which admit gapped, analytic, unitary, Lorentz invariant, and possibly non-local UV completions, by considering 2 to 2 scatterings of Jaffe fields whose…