New infra-red enhancements in 4-derivative gravity

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alberto Salvio, Alessandro Strumia, Hardi Veermäe
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2018-10-01
Series:European Physical Journal C: Particles and Fields
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-6311-1
Description
Summary: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 ‘ghostrahlung’. Super-Planckian scatterings get downgraded to Planckian by radiating hard gravitons and ghosts, which are weakly coupled and carry away the energy.
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052