Living with Ghosts and their Radiative Corrections
I. Antoniadis, E. Dudas, D.M. Ghilencea

TL;DR
This paper investigates the effects of higher derivative operators in 4D effective field theories, revealing their complex impact on UV behavior, divergences, and supersymmetry breaking, with implications for renormalization and effective field theory consistency.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis of higher derivative operators in both non-supersymmetric and supersymmetric models, highlighting their influence on UV behavior and divergence structure.
Findings
Higher derivative theories do not always improve UV behavior due to analytic continuation issues.
The one-loop scalar potential with higher derivatives requires infinitely many counterterms.
In supersymmetric models, quadratic divergences are linked to supersymmetry breaking and suppressed by the ghost scale.
Abstract
The role of higher derivative operators in 4D effective field theories is discussed in both non-supersymmetric and supersymmetric contexts. The approach, formulated in the Minkowski space-time, shows that theories with higher derivative operators do not always have an improved UV behaviour, due to subtleties related to the analytical continuation from the Minkowski to the Euclidean metric. This continuation is further affected at the dynamical level due to a field-dependence of the poles of the Green functions of the particle-like states, for curvatures of the potential of order unity in ghost mass units. The one-loop scalar potential in lambda*phi^4 theory with a single higher derivative term is shown to have infinitely many counterterms, while for a very large mass of the ghost the usual 4D renormalisation is recovered. In the supersymmetric context of the O'Raifeartaigh model of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
