Asymptotically nonlocal gravity

Higher derivative theories of gravity are associated with a mass scale to insure the correct dimensionality of the covariant derivatives. This mass scale is known as the scale of non-locality. In this paper, by considering a higher derivative toy model, we show that for a system of $n$ particles the effective mass scale is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of particles. We demonstrate that as the number of particles increases the corresponding effective ...

We derive the N=1 supersymmetric extension for a class of weakly nonlocal four dimensional gravitational theories.The construction is explicitly done in the superspace and the tree-level perturbative unitarity is explicitly proved both in the superfield formalism and in field components. For the minimal nonlocal supergravity the spectrum is the same as in the local theory and in particular it is ghost-free. The supersymmetric extension of the super-renormalizable Starobinsky ...

We study the matter one-loop quantum corrections to the gravitational sector in a gravity theory coupled with a nonlocal scalar field. We find that non-renormalizable divergences disappear when the propagator of the scalar field approaches to a non-zero constant at high momentum, while the vacuum energy is still divergent. We also comment on non-local modification of fermion, gauge field and graviton.

We present a geometrical gravitational theory which reduces to Einstein's theory for weak gravitational potentials and which has a singularity-free analog of the Schwarzschild metric.

In this paper we propose a wider class of symmetries including the Galilean shift symmetry as a subclass. We will show how to construct ghost-free nonlocal actions, consisting of infinite derivative operators, which are invariant under such symmetries, but whose functional form is not simply given by exponentials of entire functions. Motivated by this, we will consider the case of a scalar field and discuss the pole structure of the propagator which has infinitely many comple...

In this note I provide an extended version of the talk given at BW2011 workshop. The concise introduction to the non-local SFT motivated models is given with an emphasis on the non-local generalization of gravity. A number of open questions and future directions in the development of such models is outlined.

The aim of this note is to address the low energy limit of quantum field theories with a minimal length scale. The essential feature of these models is that the minimal length acts as a regulator in the asymptotic high energy limit which is incorporated through an infinite series of higher order derivatives. If one investigates a perturbative expansion in inverse powers of the Planck mass, one generically obtains extra poles in the propagator, and instabilities connected with...

It was recently found that there are classes of nonlocal gravity theories that are free of ghosts and singularities in their Newtonian limit [PRL, 108 (2012), 031101]. In these proceedings, a detailed and pedagogical derivation of a main result, the flat space propagator for an arbitrary covariant metric theory of gravitation, is presented. The result is applied to analyse f(R) models, Gauss-Bonnet theory, Weyl-squared gravity and the potentially asymptotically free nonlocal ...

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...

In the present work we investigate the Newtonian limit of higher-derivative gravity theories with more than four derivatives in the action, including the non-analytic logarithmic terms resulting from one-loop quantum corrections. The first part of the paper deals with the occurrence of curvature singularities of the metric in the classical models. It is shown that in the case of local theories, even though the curvature scalars of the metric are regular, invariants involving ...