Scale of non-locality for a system of $n$ particles

We argue that quantum gravity is nonlocal, first by recalling well-known arguments that support this idea and then by focusing on a point not usually emphasized: that making a conventional effective field theory (EFT) for quantum gravity is particularly difficult, and perhaps impossible in principle. This inability to realize an EFT comes down to the fact that gravity itself sets length scales for a problem: when integrating out degrees of freedom above some cutoff, the effec...

I outline motivations for believing that important quantum gravity effects lie beyond the Planck scale at both higher energies and longer distances and times. These motivations arise in part from the study of ultra-high energy scattering, and also from considerations in cosmology. I briefly summarize some inferences about such ultra-planckian physics, and clues we might pursue towards the principles of a more fundamental theory addressing the known puzzles and paradoxes of qu...

The study of the gravitational field produced by a spatially non-local, superposed quantum state of a massive particle is a thrilling area of modern physics. One question to be answered is whether the gravitational field behaves as the classical superposition of two particles separated by a spatial distance with half the mass located at each position or as a quantum superposition with a far more interesting and subtle behaviour for the gravitational field. Quantum field theor...

We point out the idea that, at small scales, gravity can be described by the standard degrees of freedom of general relativity, plus a scalar particle and a degree of freedom of a new type: the fakeon. This possibility leads to fundamental implications in understanding gravitational force at quantum level as well as phenomenological consequences in the corresponding classical theory.

In this note we study an interesting effect of low energy gravity on photon-photon scattering at high energies.

We evaluated the scattering amplitude of neutral scalar particles at one-loop order in the context of effective field theory of quantum gravity in the presence of a cosmological constant. Our study suggests that quantum gravitational corrections induce an asymptotic freedom behavior to the $\lambda\phi^4$ theory, for a positive cosmological constant. This result hints that a complete theory of quantum gravity can play an important role to avoid the issue of triviality in quan...

We consider the problem of Newtonian singularity in the wide class of higher derivative gravity models, including the ones which are renormalizable and super-renormalizable at the quantum level. The simplest version of the singularity-free theory has four derivatives and is pretty well-known. We argue that in all cases of local higher-derivative theories, when the poles of the propagator are real and simple, the singularities disappear due to the cancellation of contributions...

A brief introduction is given to the methods and spirit of effective lagrangians. The emphasis is on a summary of the overall picture, using a simple model as the vehicle to motivate and illustrate the main points. Powercounting is illustrated by estimating the size of the quantum corrections to the predictions of classical gravity.

In this note, we examine the scattering of two identical fermions in theories where fermionic fields minimally coupled to higher derivative gravity. In particular, we consider the extension of general relativity with $R^2$ corrections or non-local terms. We expand the action of fermions around the flat space background and obtain two fermion-one graviton vertex. Then, by considering the scattering amplitude of two fermions, we calculate the non-relativistic limit and that obt...

A local phenomenological model that reduces to a non-local gravitational theory giving dark energy is proposed. The non-local gravity action is known to fit the data as well as $\Lambda$-CDM thereby demanding a more fundamental local treatment. It is seen that the scale-invariant higher-derivative scalar-tensor theory of gravity, which is known to be ultraviolet perturbative renormalizable to all loops and where ghosts become innocuous, generates non-locality at low energies....