### Course

19R1 D. Anselmi
Theories of gravitation

Last update: October 5th 2018

PhD course – 54 hours – Videos of lectures and PDF files of slides

To be held in the first part of 2019 – Stay tuned

Program

## Microcausality

We elaborate on the idea of fake particle and its physical consequences. When a theory contains fakeons, the true classical limit is determined by the quantization and a subsequent process of “classicization”. One of the major predictions due to the fake particles is the violation of microcausality, which survives the classical limit. This fact gives hope to find ways to detect the violation experimentally. Quantum gravity predicts that at least one fakeon exists in nature, with spin 2 and a mass that could be much smaller than the Planck mass. By classicizing the theory, we work out the corrections to the field equations of general relativity. We show that the finalized equations have, in simple terms, the form $\langle F\rangle =ma$, where $\langle F\rangle$ is an average that includes a little bit of “future”.

PDF

arXiv: 1809.05037 [hep-th]

We investigate the properties of fakeons in quantum gravity at one loop. The theory is described by a graviton multiplet, which contains the fluctuation $h_{\mu \nu }$ of the metric, a massive scalar $\phi$ and the spin-2 fakeon $\chi _{\mu \nu }$. The fields $\phi$ and $\chi _{\mu \nu }$ are introduced explicitly at the level of the Lagrangian by means of standard procedures. We consider two options, where $\phi$ is quantized as a physical particle or a fakeon, and compute the absorptive part of the self-energy of the graviton multiplet. The width of $\chi _{\mu \nu }$, which is negative, shows that the theory predicts the violation of causality at energies larger than the fakeon mass. We address this issue and compare the results with those of the Stelle theory, where $\chi _{\mu \nu }$ is a ghost instead of a fakeon.

PDF

J. High Energy Phys. 11 (2018) 21 | DOI: 10.1007/JHEP11(2018)021

arXiv: 1806.03605 [hep-th]

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### Book

14B1 D. Anselmi
Renormalization

PDF

Last update: May 9th 2015, 230 pages

Contents:
Preface
1. Functional integral
2. Renormalization
3. Renormalization group
4. Gauge symmetry
5. Canonical formalism
6. Quantum electrodynamics
7. Non-Abelian gauge field theories
Notation and useful formulas
References

Course on renormalization, taught in Pisa in 2015. (More chapters will be added later.)