Speaker
Dr
Anamaria Hell
(LMU Munich)
Description
Higher-derivative theories of gravity are advocated to be power-counting renormalizable. As such, they might play a role in the possible UV completion of gravity. At the same time, some of these theories suffer from the presence of ghosts -- unphysical degrees of freedom that at the classical level lead to instability, while upon quantization, they cause violation of unitarity. In this talk, I will present boundary conditions that remove such pathological modes, studying them on the examples of Conformal and Einstein-Weyl gravity, and discuss the consequences for these theories once the boundary conditions are implemented.
