We demonstrate how, for an arbitrary number of dimensions, the Galileon actions and their covariant generalizations can be obtained through a standard Kaluza-Klein compactification of higher-dimensional Lovelock gravity. In this setup, the dilaton takes on the role of the Galileon. In addition, such compactifications uncover other more general Galilean actions, producing purely second-order equations in the weak-field limit, now both for the Galileon and the metric perturbations.
We study a scalar-tensor version of Lovelock theory with a non trivial higher order galileon term involving the coupling of the Lovelock two tensor with derivatives of the scalar galileon field. For a static and spherically symmetric spacetime we extend the Boulware-Deser solution to the presence of a Galileon field. The hairy solution has a regular scalar field on the black hole event horizon and presents certain self tuning properties for the bulk cosmological constant and the Gauss-Bonnet coupling. The combined time and radial dependence of the galileon field permits its horizon regularity.…
We derive the relativistic generalization of the Galileon, by studying the brane position modulus of a relativistic probe brane embedded in a five- dimensional bulk. In the appropriate Galilean contraction limit, we recover the complete Galileon generalization of the DGP decoupling theory and its conformal extension. All higher order interactions for the Galileon and its relativistic generalization naturally follow from the brane tension, induced curvature, and the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary terms associated with all bulk Lovelock invariants. Our approach makes the coupling to gravity strai…
We analyze spherically symmetric black hole solutions with time-dependent scalar hair in a class of Lovelock-Galileon theories, which are the scalar-tensor theories with second-order field equations in arbitrary dimensions. We first show that known black hole solutions in five dimensions are always plagued by the ghost/gradient instability in the vicinity of the horizon. We then generalize such black hole solutions to higher dimensions and show that the same instability found in five dimensions appears universally in any number of dimensions.
In the decoupling limit, the DGP model reduces to the theory of a scalar field pi, with interactions including a specific cubic self-interaction - the galileon term. This term, and its quartic and quintic generalizations, can be thought of as arising from a probe 3-brane in a 5-dimensional bulk with Lovelock terms on the brane and in the bulk. We study multi-field generalizations of the galileon, and extend this probe brane view to higher co-dimensions. We derive an extremely restrictive theory of multiple galileon fields, interacting through a quartic term controlled by a single coupling, and…
An alternative for the construction of fundamental theories is the introduction of Galileons. These are fields whose action leads to non higher than second-order equations of motion. As this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make the Hamiltonian bounded from below, as long as the action is not degenerate, the Galileon construction is a way to avoid pathologies both at the classical and quantum levels. Galileon actions are, therefore, of great interest in many branches of physics, specially in high energy physics and cosmology. This proceedings contribution presents the generalitie…
We present for the first time an explicit exposition of quantum corrections within the cubic Galileon theory including the effect of quantum gravity, in a background- and gauge-invariant manner, employing the field-reparametrisation approach of the covariant effective action at 1-loop. We show that the consideration of gravitational effects in combination with the non-linear derivative structure of the theory reveals new interactions at the perturbative level, which manifest themselves as higher-operators in the associated effective action, which' relevance is controlled by appropriate ratios …
Explicit formulae of the equations in the generalized Galileon models are given. We also develop the formulation of the reconstruction. By using the formulation, we can explicitly construct an action which reproduces an arbitrary development of the expansion of the universe. The conditions how the reconstructed solution becomes stable and therefore it becomes an attractor solution are also given. Working in the static and spherically symmetric space-time, we investigate how the Vainshtein mechanism works in the generalized Galileon model and the correction to the Newton law becomes small. It i…
We study quantum aspects of the galileon duality, especially in the case of a particular interacting galileon theory that is said to be dual to a free theory through the action of a simultaneous field and coordinate transformation. This would appear to map a theory with multiple vacua to one with a unique vacuum state. However, by regulating the duality transformation using external sources, we are able to preserve the full vacuum structure in the dual frame. By explicitly calculating the one-particle irreducible effective action on a maximally symmetric background, we identify a semi-classica…
In this article we consider the second law of black holes (and other causal horizons) in theories where the gravitational action is an arbitrary function of the Lovelock densities. We show that there exists an entropy which increases locally, for linearized perturbations to regular Killing horizons. In addition to a classical increase theorem, we also prove a generalized second law for semiclassical, minimally-coupled matter fields.
In the spirit of Galileon inflation and by considering some sorts of non-canonical kinetic terms in the action, we realize a stage of super-inflation leading to a blue-tilted tensor perturbation. We show also that addition of Galileon-like term to the action leads to avoidance of ghost instabilities in this setup.
We examine the variational problem in Lovelock gravity when the boundary contains timelike and spacelike segments nonsmoothly glued. We show that two kinds of contributions have to be added to the action. The first one is associated to the presence of a boundary in every segment and it depends on intrinsic and extrinsic curvatures. We can think of this contribution as adding a total derivative to the usual surface term of Lovelock gravity. The second one appears in every joint between two segments and it involves the integral along the joint of the Jacobson-Myers entropy density weighted by th…
We show that it is possible to formulate string theory as a "Galileon string theory". The galileon field $χ$ enters in the definition of the integration measure in the action. Following the methods of the modified measure string theory, we find that the final equations are again those of Polyakov. Moreover, the string tension appears again as an additional dynamical degree of freedom. At the same time the theory satisfies all requirements of the galileon higher derivative theory at the action level while the equations of motion are still of the second order. A galileon symmetry is displayed ex…
The cubic Galileon model containing the lowest non-trivial order action of the full Galileon action can produce the stable late-time cosmic acceleration. This model can have a significant role in the growth of structures. The signatures of the cubic Galileon model in the structure formation can be probed by the weak lensing statistics. Weak lensing convergence statistics is one of the strongest probes to the structure formation and hence it can probe the dark energy or modified theories of gravity models. In this work, we investigate the detectability of the cubic Galileon model from the $ Λ$C…
We consider the Lagrangian of a vector field with derivative self-interactions with a priori arbitrary coefficients. Starting with a flat space-time we show that for a special choice of the coefficients of the self-interactions the ghost-like pathologies disappear. For this we use the degeneracy condition of the Hessian. This constitutes the Galileon-type generalization of the Proca action with only three propagating physical degrees of freedom. The longitudinal mode of the vector field is associated to the usual Galileon interactions for a specific choice of the overall functions. In differen…
We study the cosmology of the multifield relativistic Galileon model in which an induced gravity term is added to the Dirac-Born-Infeld action. We highlight the physical insight that is gained by employing a bimetric perspective in which the induced gravity and Einstein-Hilbert action are treated on equal footing. We derive the conditions under which a phase of quasi exponential inflation can be sustained and demonstrate the existence of a critical background energy density above which cosmological fluctuations become ghosts. At the non-linear level, this scenario provides the first concrete e…
We calculate the one-loop quantum corrections in the cubic Galileon theory, using cutoff regularization. We confirm the expected form of the one-loop effective action and that the couplings of the Galileon theory do not get renormalized. However, new terms, not included in the tree-level action, are induced by quantum corrections. We also consider the one-loop corrections in an effective brane theory, which belongs to the Horndeski or generalized Galileon class. We find that new terms are generated by quantum corrections, while the tree-level couplings are also renormalized. We conclude that t…
We construct a consistent model of Galileon scalar electrodynamics. The model satisfies three essential requirements: (1) The action contains higher-order derivative terms, and obey the Galilean symmetry, (2) Equations of motion also satisfy Galilean symmetry and contain only up to second-order derivative terms in the matter fields and, hence do not suffer from instability, and (3) local U(1) gauge invariance is preserved. We show that the non-minimal coupling terms in our model are different from that of the real scalar Galileon models; however, they match with the Galileon real scalar field …
We show that the four-dimensional Lovelock-Cartan action can be derived from a massless gauge theory for the $SO(1,3)$ group with an additional BRST trivial part. The model is originally composed by a topological sector and a BRST exact piece and has no explicit dependence on the metric, the vierbein or a mass parameter. The vierbein is introduced together with a mass parameter through some BRST trivial constraints. The effect of the constraints is to identify the vierbein with some of the additional fields, transforming the original action into the Lovelock-Cartan one. In this scenario, the m…
We study matching conditions for a spherically symmetric thin shell in Lovelock gravity which can be read off from the variation of the corresponding first-order action. In point of fact, the addition of Myers' boundary terms to the gravitational action eliminates the dependence on the acceleration in this functional and such that the canonical momentum appears in the surface term in the variation of the total action. This procedure leads to junction conditions given by the discontinuity of the canonical momentum defined for an evolution normal to the boundary. In particular, we correct existi…
We derive the 1-loop effective action of the cubic Galileon coupled to quantum-gravitational fluctuations in a background and gauge-independent manner, employing the covariant framework of DeWitt and Vilkovisky. Although the bare action respects shift symmetry, the coupling to gravity induces an effective mass to the scalar, of the order of the cosmological constant, as a direct result of the non-flat field-space metric, the latter ensuring the field-reparametrization invariance of the formalism. Within a gauge-invariant regularization scheme, we discover novel, gravitationally induced non-Gal…
We re-analyze a possible ambiguity in the application of dimensional regularization to Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, arising from the way one treats the Gauss-Bonnet term. It is demonstrated that the addition of such a term to the action gives rise to a non-minimal graviton wave operator, but does not produce new on shell divergences at one loop order in d=4. However, from a d-dimensional perspective the Gauss-Bonnet term is shown to generate new divergences in the form of the six-dimensional Euler density. The conjecture that one would next produce the eight-dimensional Euler term is shown t…
Very few explicit inflationary scenarios are known to generate a large bispectrum of orthogonal shape. Dirac-Born-Infeld Galileon inflation, in which an induced gravity term is added to the DBI action, is one such model. We formulate it in the language of the effective field theory of inflation by identifying the unitary gauge operators that govern the behavior of its cosmological fluctuations. We show how to recover rather easily from this its power spectrum and bispectrum, which we calculated previously using standard cosmological perturbation theory. We push our calculations up to the deter…
We study dynamical structure of Pure Lovelock gravity in spacetime dimensions higher than four using the Hamiltonian formalism. The action consists of cosmological constant and a single higher-order polynomial in the Riemann tensor. Similarly to Einstein-Hilbert action, it possesses a unique constant curvature vacuum and charged black hole solutions. We analyze physical degrees of freedom and local symmetries in this theory. In contrast to the Einstein-Hilbert case, a number of degrees of freedom depends on the background and can vary from zero to the maximal value carried by the Lovelock theo…
We present a novel derivation of the boundary term for the action in Lanczos-Lovelock gravity, starting from the boundary contribution in the variation of the Lanczos-Lovelock action. The derivation presented here is straightforward, i.e., one starts from the Lanczos-Lovelock action principle and the action itself dictates the boundary structure and hence the boundary term one needs to add to the action to make it well-posed. It also gives the full structure of the contribution at the boundary of the complete action, enabling us to read off the degrees of freedom to be fixed at the boundary, t…
We discuss the approaches by Deffayet et al. (DPSV) and Kobayashi et al. (KYY) to the analysis of linearized scalar perturbations about a spatially flat FLRW background in Horndeski theory. We identify additional, potentially important terms in the DPSV approach. However, these terms vanish upon a judicious gauge choice. We derive a gauge invariant quadratic action for metric and Galileon perturbations in $\mathcal{L}_3$ and $\mathcal{L}_3+\mathcal{L}_4$ theories and show that actions obtained in the DPSV and KYY approaches follow from this gauge invariant action in particular gauges.
In this paper, we introduce the counterterms that remove the non-logarithmic divergences of the action in third order Lovelock gravity for static spacetimes. We do this by defining the cosmological constant in such a way that the asymptotic form of the metric have the same form in Lovelock and Einstein gravities. Thus, we employ the counterterms of Einstein gravity and show that the power law divergences of the action of Lovelock gravity for static spacetimes can be removed by suitable choice of coefficients. We find that the dependence of these coefficients on the dimension in Lovelock gravit…
Cosmological inflation provides the initial conditions for the structure formation. However, the origin of large-scale magnetic fields cannot be addressed in this framework. The key issue for this long-standing problem is the conformal invariance of the electromagnetic (EM) field in 4-D. While many approaches have been proposed in the literature for breaking conformal invariance of the EM action, here, we provide a completely new way of looking at the modifications to the EM action and generation of primordial magnetic fields during inflation. We explicitly construct a higher derivative EM act…
We show that scalar, 0-form, Galileon actions --models whose field equations contain only second derivatives-- can be generalized to arbitrary even p-forms. More generally, they need not even depend on a single form, but may involve mixed p combinations, including equal p multiplets, where odd p-fields are also permitted: We construct, for given dimension D, general actions depending on scalars, vectors and higher p-form field strengths, whose field equations are of exactly second derivative order. We also discuss and illustrate their curved-space generalizations, especially the delicate non-m…
A Palatini-type action for Einstein and Gauss-Bonnet gravity with non-trivial torsion is proposed. Three-form flux is incorporated via a deformation of the Riemann tensor, and consistency of the Palatini variational principle requires the flux to be covariantly constant and to satisfy a Jacobi identity. Studying gravity actions of third order in the curvature leads to a conjecture about general Palatini-Lovelock-Cartan gravity. We point out potential relations to string-theoretic Bianchi identities and, using the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket, derive a set of Bianchi identities for the non-geomet…
We study a cosmological scenario in which the DBI action governing the motion of a D3-brane in a higher-dimensional spacetime is supplemented with an induced gravity term. The latter reduces to the quartic Galileon Lagrangian when the motion of the brane is non-relativistic and we show that it tends to violate the null energy condition and to render cosmological fluctuations ghosts. There nonetheless exists an interesting parameter space in which a stable phase of quasi-exponential expansion can be achieved while the induced gravity leaves non trivial imprints. We derive the exact second-order…
The gravitational interaction is expected to be modified for very short distances. This is particularly important in situations in which the curvature of spacetime is large in general, such as close to the initial cosmological singularity. The gravitational dynamics is then captured by the higher curvature terms in the action, making it difficult to reliably extrapolate any prediction of general relativity. In this note we review pure Lovelock equations for Kasner-type metrics. These equations correspond to a single $N$th order Lovelock term in the action in $d=2N+1,\,2N+2$ dimensions, and the…
In the decoupling limit of DGP, Pi describes the brane-bending degree of freedom. It obeys second order equations of motion, yet it is governed by a higher derivative Lagrangian. We show that, analogously to the Einstein-Hilbert action for GR, the Pi-Lagrangian requires Gibbons-Hawking-York type boundary terms to render the variational principle well-posed. These terms are important if there are other boundaries present besides the DGP brane, such as in higher dimensional cascading DGP models. We derive the necessary boundary terms in two ways. First, we derive them directly from the brane-loc…
A ghost-free metric formulation of the recently proposed covariant Galileon model \cite{RPgal} which retains the internal shift symmetry has been constructed. This presents a new result because the covariant Galileon models introduced so far in the literature lacks the full Galileon symmetry. We demonstrate that the same general procedure is applicable to all the Galileon interaction terms and the resulting ghost-free Galileon action respecting internal shift symmetry cannot predict the late time acceleration of the universe. However, weakly breaking the shift symmetry in the covariant Galileo…
A theory of gravity in higher dimensions is considered. The usual Einstein-Hilbert action is supplemented with Lovelock terms, of higher order in the curvature tensor. These terms are important for the low energy action of string theories. The intersection of hypersurfaces is studied in the Lovelock theory. The study is restricted to hypersurfaces of co-dimension 1, $(d-1)$-dimensional submanifolds in a $d$-dimensional space-time. It is found that exact thin shells of matter are admissible, with a mild form of curvature singularity: the first derivative of the metric is discontinuous across th…
It was proved more than three decades ago, that the first order $α'$ correction of string effective theory could be written as the Gauss-Bonnet term, which is the quadratic term of Lovelock gravity. In cosmological background, with an appropriate field redefinition, we reorganize the infinite $α'$ corrections of string effective action into a finite term expression for any specific dimension. This finite term expression matches Lovelock gravity exactly and thus fix the couplings of Lovelock gravity by the coefficients of string effective action. This result thus provides a strong support to st…
Although gravitational actions diverge in asymptotically AdS spacetimes, boundary counterterms can be added in order to cancel out those divergences; such counterterms are known in general to third order in the Riemann tensor for the Einstein-Hilbert action. Considering foliations of AdS with an $S^m \times H^{d-m}$ boundary, we discuss a simple algorithm which we use to generate counterterms up to sixth order in the Riemann tensor, for the Einstein-Hilbert, Gauss-Bonnet and third-order-Lovelock Lagrangians. We also comment on other theories such as $F(R)$ gravity.
Intersecting hypersurfaces in classical Lovelock gravity are studied exploiting the description of the Lovelock Lagrangian as a sum of dimensionally continued Euler densities. We wish to present an interesting geometrical approach to the problem. The analysis allows us to deal most efficiently with the division of space-time into a honeycomb network of cells produced by an arbitrary arrangement of membranes of matter. We write the gravitational action as bulk terms plus integrals over each lower dimensional intersection. The spin connection is discontinuous at the shared boundaries of the cell…
In this paper, we study existence and stability of static black holes in Lovelock theories with a particular focus on pure Lovelock black holes. We derive the equation of stability from action without using S-deformation approach. It turns out that though pure-Lovelock black hole in even dimension is always unstable, however introduction of $Λ$ stablizes it by prescribing a lower threshold mass while there also exists an upper bound on mass which is given by existence of horizon. We also study stability of dimensionally continued black holes as well as of pure Lovelock analogue of BTZ black ho…
Starting from the general Horndeski action, we derive the most general effective theory for scalar perturbations around flat space that allows us to screen fifth forces via the Vainshtein mechanism. The effective theory is described by a generalization of the Galileon Lagrangian, which we use to study the stability of spherically symmetric configurations exhibiting the Vainshtein effect. In particular, we discuss the phenomenological consequences of a scalar-tensor coupling that is absent in the standard Galileon Lagrangian. This coupling controls the superluminality and stability of fluctuati…
We modify the scalar Einstein-aether theory by breaking the Lorentz invariance of a gravitational theory coupled to a Galileon type scalar field. This is done by introducing a Lagrange multiplier term into the action, thus ensuring that the gradient of the scalar field is time-like, with unit norm. The theory can also be considered as an extension to the mimetic dark matter theory, by adding some derivative self interactions to the action, which keeps the equation of motion at most second order in time derivatives. The cosmological implications of the model are discussed in detail. In particul…
We apply the converse of Noether's second theorem to the first-order $n$-dimensional Lovelock action, considering the frame rotation group as both $SO\left(1,n-1\right)$ or as $SO(n)$. As a result, we get the well-known invariance under local Lorentz transformations or $SO(n)$ transformations and diffeomorphisms, for odd- and even-dimensional manifolds. We also obtain the so-called `local translations' with nonvanishing constant $Λ$ for odd-dimensional manifolds when a certain relation among the coefficients of the various terms of the first-order Lovelock Lagrangian is satisfied. When this re…
We derive boundary terms appropriate for the general Lanczos-Lovelock action on a null boundary, when Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed. We believe that these boundary terms have been derived for the first time in the literature. In this derivation, we rely only on the structure of the boundary variation of the action for Lanczos-Lovelock gravity. We also provide the null boundary term for Gauss-Bonnet gravity separately.
In this paper we show that the flat space Galilean theories with up to three scalars in the equation of motion (the quartic Galileons) are recovered in the decoupling limit of certain scalar theories non-minimally coupled to gravity, the so-called "Slotheonic" theories. These theories are also invariant under the generalized Galilean shifts in curved spacetime. While Galilean self-(derivative)couplings are not explicit in the action, they appear after integrating out gravity. We then argue that Galilean supersymmetric theories may only be found in the context of supergravity. Finally, we discu…
In this paper we show how to translate into tensorial language the Chern-Weil theorem for the Lorentz symmetry, which equates the difference of the Euler densities of two manifolds to the exterior derivative of a transgression form. For doing so we need to introduce an auxiliary, hybrid, manifold whose geometry we construct explicitely. This allows us to find the vector density, constructed out of spacetime quantities only, whose divergence is the exterior derivative of the transgression form. As a consequence we can show how the Einstein-Hilbert, Gauss-Bonnet and, in general, the Euler scalar…
We review and discuss some recent progress in Lovelock and Horndeski theories modifying Einstein's General Relativity. Using as our guide the uniqueness properties of these modified gravity theories we then discuss how Kaluza-Klein reduction of Lovelock theory can lead to effective scalar-tensor actions including several important terms of Horndeski theory. We show how this can be put to practical use by mapping analytic black hole solutions of one theory to the other. We then elaborate on the subset of Horndeski theory that has self-tuning properties and review a generic method giving scalar-…
We propose a multi-field extension of (generalized) G-inflation, based on covariant multi-galileons and their generalization preserving second-order field equations. We compute the quadratic action for cosmological perturbations. By comparing the formulas for cosmological perturbations, it is highlighted that multi-field DBI galileon inflation is not included in the multi-field version of generalized G-inflation. Our result indicates that the generalized covariant multi-galileon theory is not the most general multi-scalar-tensor theory with second-order field equations.
We study certain bi-scalar-tensor theories emanating from conformal symmetry requirements of Horndeski's four-dimensional action. The former scalar is a Galileon with shift symmetry whereas the latter scalar is adjusted to have a higher order conformal coupling. Employing technics from local Weyl geometry certain Galileon higher order terms are thus constructed to be conformally invariant. The combined shift and partial conformal symmetry of the action, allow us to construct exact black hole solutions. The black holes initially found are of planar horizon geometry embedded in anti de Sitter sp…
It is well known that a rotating black hole in four dimension could be overspun by linear order test particle accretion which however always gets overturned when non-linear perturbations are included. It turns out that in the Einstein gravity, repulsion due to rotation dominates over attraction due to mass in dimensions, $D>5$, and consequently black hole cannot be overspun even for linear order accretion. For the pure Lovelock rotating black hole, this dimensional threshold is $D>4N+1$ where $N$ is degree of single $N$th order term in the Lovelock polynomial in the action. Thus the pure Lovel…
We develop a covariant scheme to describe the dynamics of small perturbations on Lovelock type extended objects propagating in a flat Minkowski spacetime. The higher-dimensional analogue of the Jacobi equation in this theory becomes a wave type equation for a scalar field $Φ$. Whithin this framework, we analyse the stability of membranes with a de Sitter geometry where we find that the Jacobi equation specializes to a Klein-Gordon (KG) equation for $Φ$ possessing a tachyonic mass. This shows that, to some extent, these type of extended objects share the symmetries of the Dirac-Nambu-Goto (DNG)…
We derive the conformal constraints satisfied by classical vertices of a (Einstein) Gauss-Bonnet theory around flat space, in general dimensions and at $d=4$ (4d EGB). In $4d$ EGB they are obtained by a singular limit of the integral of the Euler-Poincarè density. Our analysis exploits the relation between this theory and the conformal anomaly action, which allows to uncover some interesting features of the GB vertex at cubic and quartic level. If we introduce a conformal decomposition of the metric, the resulting theory can be formulated in two different versions, which are regularization dep…
Ghost-free bimetric theories describe nonlinear interactions of massive and massless spin-2 fields and, hence, provide a natural framework for investigating the phenomenon of partial masslessness for massive spin-2 fields at the nonlinear level. In this paper we analyze the spectrum of the ghost-free bimetric theory in arbitrary dimensions. Using a recently proposed construction, we identify the candidate nonlinear partially massless (PM) theories. It is shown that, in a 2-derivative setup, nonlinear PM theories can exist only in 3 and 4 dimensions. But on adding Lanczos-Lovelock terms to the …
In four space-time dimensions, there are good theoretical reasons for believing that General Relativity is the correct geometrical theory of gravity, at least at the classical level. If one admits the possibility of extra space-time dimensions, what would we expect classical gravity to be like? It is often stated that the most natural generalisation is Lovelock's theory, which shares many physical properties with GR. But there are also key differences and problems. A potentially serious problem is the breakdown of determinism, which can occur when the matrix of coefficients of second time deri…
f(Lovelock) gravities are simple generalizations of the usual f(R) and Lovelock theories in which the gravitational action depends on some arbitrary function of the corresponding dimensionally-extended Euler densities. In this paper we study several aspects of these theories in general dimensions. We start by identifying the generalized boundary term which makes the gravitational variational problem well-posed. Then, we show that these theories are equivalent to certain scalar-tensor theories and how this relation is characterized by the Hessian of f. We also study the linearized equations of …
We revise two regularization mechanisms for Lovelock gravity with AdS asymptotics. The first one corresponds to the Dirichlet counterterm method, where local functionals of the boundary metric are added to the bulk action on top of a Gibbons-Hawking-Myers term that defines the Dirichlet problem in gravity. The generalized Gibbons-Hawking term can be found in any Lovelock theory following the Myers' procedure to achieve a well-posed action principle for a Dirichlet boundary condition on the metric, which is proved to be equivalent to the Hamiltonian formulation for a radial foliation of spaceti…
The Lanczos-Lovelock models of gravity constitute the most general theories of gravity in D dimensions which satisfy (a) the principle of of equivalence, (b) the principle of general co-variance, and (c) have field equations involving derivatives of the metric tensor only up to second order. The mth order Lanczos-Lovelock Lagrangian is a polynomial of degree m in the curvature tensor. The field equations resulting from it become trivial in the critical dimension $D = 2m$ and the action itself can be written as the integral of an exterior derivative of an expression involving the vierbeins, in …
We recently showed how it is possible to use a cubic Galileon action to construct classical cosmological solutions that enter a contracting null energy condition (NEC) violating phase, bounce at finite values of the scale factor and exit into an expanding NEC-satisfying phase without encountering any singularities or pathologies. A drawback of these examples is that singular behavior is encountered at some time either just before or just after the NEC-violating phase. In this Letter, we show that it is possible to circumvent this problem by extending our method to actions that include the next…
We study motion around a static Einstein and pure Lovelock black hole in higher dimensions. It is known that in higher dimensions, bound orbits exist only for pure Lovelock black hole in all even dimensions, D=2N+2, where N is degree of Lovelock polynomial action. In particular, we compute periastron shift and light bending and the latter is given by one of transverse spatial components of Riemann curvature tensor. We also consider pseudo-Newtonian potentials and Kruskal coordinates.
In this paper we show that pure Lovelock static Schwarzschild's analogue black hole in dimensions $d>3N+1$, where $N$ is the degree of Lovelock polynomial action, is stable even though pure Gauss-Bonnet $N=2$ black hole is unstable in dimension $d<7$. We also discuss and compare quasinormal modes for pure Lovelock and the corresponding Einstein black hole in the same dimension. We find that perturbations decay with characteristic time which is weakly dimensional dependent as it depends only on the gravitational potential of the background solution, while frequency of oscillations however depen…
The extension of the general relativity theory to higher dimensions, so that the field equations for the metric remain of second order, is done through the Lovelock action. This action can also be interpreted as the dimensionally continued Euler characteristics of lower dimensions. The theory has many constant coefficients apparently without any physical meaning. However, it is possible, in a natural way, to reduce to two (the cosmological and Newton's constant) these several arbitrary coefficients, yielding a restricted Lovelock gravity. In this process one separates theories in even dimensio…
