Speaker
Evangelos Tsolakidis
Description
In this talk, I will discuss classical irrelevant deformations of quantum field theories with higher-derivatives in two dimensions. The starting point will be the formal solution of the Zamolodchikov--Smirnov flow equation, which assumes the form: de Rham--Gabadadze--Tolley massive gravity plus matter, and it relies heavily on a well-defined Hilbert stress tensor. For higher-derivative theories the latter is no longer guaranteed, indicating limitations of this approach. To demonstrate this, I will briefly discuss the case of a free scalar with second order derivatives. The arising issues are easily rectified by introducing appropriate auxiliary matter fields which prove challenging to integrate out after the deformation.
