Exorcizing Ghosts from the Vacuum Spectra in String-inspired Nonlocal Tachyon Condensation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Nortier, Florian
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Nortier, Florian
author_facet Nortier, Florian
contents Tachyon condensation in quantum field theory (QFT) plays a central role in models of fundamental interactions and cosmology. Inspired by tower truncation in string field theory, ultraviolet completions were proposed with infinite-derivative form factors that preclude the appearance of pathological ghosts in the particle spectrum, contrary to other local higher-derivative QFT's. However, if the infinite-derivative QFT exhibits other vacua, each of them has its own spectrum, which is generally not ghost-free: an infinite tower of ghost-like resonances pops up above the nonlocal scale at tree-level, whose consistency is unclear. In this article, a new weakly nonlocal deformation of a generic local QFT is introduced via a Lorentz and gauge covariant star-product of fields, which is commutative but nonassociative in general. This framework realizes tachyon condensation without ghosts at the perturbative level, with applications for spontaneous symmetry breaking.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_11741
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exorcizing Ghosts from the Vacuum Spectra in String-inspired Nonlocal Tachyon Condensation
Nortier, Florian
High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Tachyon condensation in quantum field theory (QFT) plays a central role in models of fundamental interactions and cosmology. Inspired by tower truncation in string field theory, ultraviolet completions were proposed with infinite-derivative form factors that preclude the appearance of pathological ghosts in the particle spectrum, contrary to other local higher-derivative QFT's. However, if the infinite-derivative QFT exhibits other vacua, each of them has its own spectrum, which is generally not ghost-free: an infinite tower of ghost-like resonances pops up above the nonlocal scale at tree-level, whose consistency is unclear. In this article, a new weakly nonlocal deformation of a generic local QFT is introduced via a Lorentz and gauge covariant star-product of fields, which is commutative but nonassociative in general. This framework realizes tachyon condensation without ghosts at the perturbative level, with applications for spontaneous symmetry breaking.
title Exorcizing Ghosts from the Vacuum Spectra in String-inspired Nonlocal Tachyon Condensation
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11741