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

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel weakly nonlocal deformation of local quantum field theories that enables ghost-free tachyon condensation, with potential applications in spontaneous symmetry breaking in fundamental physics.
Contribution
It proposes a new Lorentz and gauge covariant star-product framework that achieves ghost-free tachyon condensation without ghosts at the perturbative level.
Findings
Successfully avoids ghosts in tachyon condensation models
Provides a new mathematical framework for nonlocal QFTs
Potential applications in spontaneous symmetry breaking
Abstract
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…
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