English

New infra-red enhancements in 4-derivative gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-11-14 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

4-derivative gravity provides a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity at the price of introducing a physical ghost, which could admit a sensible positive-energy quantization. To understand its physics, we compute ghost-mediated scatterings among matter particles at tree-level, finding a new power-like infra-red enhancement typical of 4-derivative theories, that we dub 'ghostrahlungghostrahlung'. Super-Planckian scatterings get downgraded to Planckian by radiating hard gravitons and ghosts, which are weakly coupled and carry away the energy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.07883,
  title  = {New infra-red enhancements in 4-derivative gravity},
  author = {Alberto Salvio and Alessandro Strumia and Hardi Veermae},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07883},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

20 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:42:16.910Z