Infrared problem in the Faddeev-Popov ghost propagator in perturbative quantum gravity in de Sitter spacetime

Abstract

The propagators for the Faddeev-Popov (FP) ghosts in Yang-Mills theory and perturbative gravity in the covariant gauge are infrared (IR) divergent in de Sitter spacetime. An IR cutoff in the momentum space to regularize these divergences breaks the de Sitter invariance. These IR divergences are due to the spatially constant modes in the Yang-Mills case and the modes proportional to the Killing vectors in the case of perturbative gravity. It has been proposed that these IR divergences can be removed, with the de Sitter invariance preserved, by first regularizing them with an additional mass term for the FP ghosts and then taking the massless limit. In the Yang-Mills case, this procedure has been shown to correspond to requiring that the physical states, and the vacuum state in particular, be annihilated by some conserved charges in the Landau gauge. In this paper we show that there are similar conserved charges in perturbative gravity in the covariant Landau gauge in de Sitter spacetime and that the IR-regularization procedure described above also correspond to requiring that the vacuum state be annihilated by these charges with a natural definition of the interacting vacuum state.