According to folklore in general relativity, the Weyl tensor can be decomposed into parts corresponding to Newton-like, incoming and outgoing wavelike field components. It is shown here that this one-to-one correspondence does not hold for space-time geometries with cylindrical isometries. This is done by investigating some well-known exact solutions of Einstein's field equations with whole-cylindrical symmetry, for which the physical interpretation is very clear, but for which the standard Weyl interpretation would give contradictory results. For planar or spherical geometries, however, the standard interpretation works for both, static and dynamical space-times. It is argued that one reason for the failure in the cylindrical case is that for waves spreading in two spatial dimensions there is no local criterion to distinguish incoming and outgoing waves already at the linear level. It turns out that Thorne's local energy notion, subject to certain qualifications, provides an efficient diagnostic tool to extract the proper physical interpretation of the space-time geometry in the case of cylindrical configurations.
Recently a generalization of the Fefferman-Graham gauge for asymptotically locally AdS spacetimes, called the Weyl-Fefferman-Graham (WFG) gauge, has been proposed. It was shown that the WFG gauge induces a Weyl geometry on the conformal boundary. The Weyl geometry consists of a metric and a Weyl connection. Thus, this is a useful setting for studying dual field theories with background Weyl symmetry. Working in the WFG formalism, we find the generalization of obstruction tensors, which are Weyl-covariant tensors that appear as poles in the Fefferman-Graham expansion of the bulk metric for even…
Hamiltonian Expression of Curvature Tensors in the York Canonical Basis: II) The Weyl Tensor, Weyl Scalars, the Weyl Eigenvalues and the Problem of the Observables of the Gravitational Field
We investigate cosmological inflationary scenarios from a gravitoelectromagnetic theory. Our work is formulated in the light of a recently introduced geometrical Weyl-Invariant scalar-tensor theory of gravity, where the nature of both the electromagnetic potential and the inflaton field is attributed to the space-time geometry. We obtain a Harrison-Zeldovich power spectrum for quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field. In our model the electromagnetic fields have also a nearly scale invariant power spectrum for a power-law inflation. We found that the the seed magnetic fields have a nearly sc…
We introduce a new Weyl-invariant and generally-covariant vector-tensor theory with higher derivatives. This theory can be induced by extending the mimetic construction to vector fields of conformal weight four. We demonstrate that in gauge-invariant variables this novel theory reduces to the Henneaux-Teitelboim description of the unimodular gravity. Hence, compared with the standard general relativity, our new higher derivative vector-tensor theory has only one new global degree of freedom - the cosmological constant. Finally we discuss potential extensions of this vector-tensor theory.
It is well-known that the conformal structure of a relativistic spacetime is of profound physical and conceptual interest. In this note, we consider the analogous structure for Newtonian theories. We show that the Newtonian Weyl tensor is an invariant of this structure.
We perform a manifestly covariant quantization of a Weyl invariant, i.e., a locally scale invariant, scalar-tensor gravity in the extended de Donder gauge condition (or harmonic gauge condition) for general coordinate invariance and a new scalar gauge for Weyl invariance within the framework of BRST formalism. It is shown that choral symmetry, which is a Poincar${\rm{\acute{e}}}$-like $\IOSp(8|8)$ supersymmetry in case of Einstein gravity, is extended to a Poincar${\rm{\acute{e}}}$-like $\IOSp(10|10)$ supersymmetry. We point out that there is a gravitational conformal symmetry in quantum gravi…
We provide evidence that gravitational radiation in a 4D radiation-dominated universe, with equation-of-state $w=1/3$, consists of two components: helicity-2 gravitons and massless scalar acoustic waves. On physical grounds, we would expect the homogeneous solution of the Weyl tensor components to be a good approximation to its inhomogeneous counterparts, whenever the observer is located well in the far zone of an isolated astrophysical source of cosmological gravitational radiation. We show explicitly that these homogeneous and inhomogeneous solutions both receive contributions from the gauge…
A set of new tensors of purely geometric origin have been investigated, which form a hierarchy. A tensor of a lower rank plays the role of the potential for the tensor of one rank higher. The tensors have interesting mathematical and physical properties. The highest rank-tensor of the hierarchy, possesses all the geometrical properties of the Weyl tensor.
Penrose suggested that issues with the origin of the second law of thermodynamics and the remarkable homogeneous and isotropic nature of the universe on large scales can be resolved with a concept of an entropy for gravitational fields captured by the Weyl curvature tensor. This has led to various proposals for an entropy density for gravity constructed from the Weyl tensor. Most work investigating such entropy densities have been restricted to general relativity and little work has been done to them in modified theories of gravity. To remedy this, we investigate the simplest proposal for an e…
A peeling theorem for the Weyl tensor in higher dimensional Lorentzian manifolds is presented. We obtain it by generalizing a proof from the four dimensional case. We derive a generic behavior, discuss interesting subcases and retrieve the four dimensional result.
We obtain vacuum solutions in the presence of a cosmological constant in the context of the Weyl geometrical scalar-tensor theory. We investigate the limit when $ω$ goes to infinity and show by working out the solutions that in this limit there are some cases in which the scalar field tends to a constant (with the implicit consequence of the geometry becoming Riemannian), although the solutions do not reduce to the corresponding Einstein solutions. We have also extended a previous result, known in the literature, by showing that in the case of vacuum with cosmological constant the field equati…
We have studied polarized image of a Schwarzschild black hole with an equatorial thin accretion disk as photon couples to Weyl tensor. The birefringence of photon originating from the coupling affect the black hole shadow, the thin disk pattern and its luminosity distribution. We also analyze the observed polarized intensity in the sky plane. The observed polarized intensity in the bright region is stronger than that in the darker region. The stronger effect of the coupling on the observed polarized vector appears only in the bright region close to black hole. These features in the polarized i…
A black ring is an asymptotically flat vacuum solution of the Einstein equations with an event horizon of topology $S^1\times S^2$. A connection between the black ring entropy and its Weyl tensor $C_{μνλρ}$ is explored by interpreting the Weyl scalar invariant $C_{μνλρ} C^{μνλρ}$ as the entropy density in 5-dimensional space-time. We calculate the proper volume integral of $C_{μνλρ} C^{μνλρ}$ for a neutral black ring and prove that it is proportional to the entropy of a thin black ring. Similar calculations are extended to more general cases: the black string, the black ring with two angular m…
We prove that, in a space-time of dimension n>3 with a velocity field that is shear-free, vorticity-free and acceleration-free, the covariant divergence of the Weyl tensor is zero if the contraction of the Weyl tensor with the velocity is zero. The other way, if the covariant divergence of the Weyl tensor is zero, then the contraction of the Weyl tensor with the velocity has recurrent geodesic derivative. This partly extends a property found in Generalised Robertson-Walker spacetimes, where the velocity is also eigenvector of the Ricci tensor. Despite the simplicity of the statement, the proof…
