Who you gonna call? Runaway ghosts, higher derivatives and time-dependence in EFTs

We briefly review the formulation of effective field theories (EFTs) in timedependent situations, with particular attention paid to their domain of validity. Our main interest is the extent to which solutions of the EFT capture the dynamics of the full theory. For a simple model we show by explicit calculation that the low-energy action obtained from a sensible UV completion need not take the restrictive form required to obtain only secondorder …