Unimodular gravity is an interesting approach to address the cosmological constant problem, since the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate in this framework, and the cosmological constant appears as an integration constant. These features arise as a consequence of considering a constrained volume element 4-form that breaks the diffeomorphisms invariance down to volume preserving diffeomorphisms. In this work, the first-order formulation of unimodular gravity is presented by considering the spin density of matter fields as a source of spacetime torsion. Even though the most general matter Lagrangian allowed by the symmetries is considered, dynamical restrictions arise on their functional dependence. The field equations are obtained and the conservation laws associated with the symmetries are derived. It is found that, analogous to torsion-free unimodular gravity, the field equation for the vierbein is traceless; nevertheless, torsion is algebraically related to the spin density as in standard Einstein-Cartan theory. The particular example of massless Dirac spinors is studied, and comparisons with standard Einstein-Cartan theory are shown.
A sequence of generalizations of Cartan's conservation of torsion theorem is given for n-dimensional differentiable manifolds having a general linear connection.
We derive the fixed-$Λ$ and unimodular propagators using the path integral formalism as applied to the Einstein-Cartan action. The simplicity of the action (which is linear in the lapse function) allows for an exact integration starting from the lapse function and the enforcement of the Hamiltonian constraint, leading to a product of Chern-Simons states if the connection is fixed at the endpoints. No saddle point approximation is needed. Should the metric be fixed at the endpoints, then, depending on the contour chosen for the connection, Hartle-Hawking or Vilenkin propagators are obtained. Th…
In the light of the local Lorentz transformations and the general Noether theorem, a new formulate of the general covariant angular momentum conservation law in Einstein-Cartan gravitation theory is obtained, which overcomes the critical difficulty in the other formulates that the conservation law depended on the coordinative choice.
In this review we discuss emergence of unimodular gravity (or, more precisely, Weyl transverse gravity) from thermodynamics of spacetime. By analyzing three different ways to obtain gravitational equations of motion by thermodynamic arguments, we show that the results point to unimodular rather than fully diffeomorphism invariant theories and that this is true even for modified gravity. The unimodular character of dynamics is especially evident from the status of cosmological constant and energy-momentum conservation.
Unimodular gravity provides a theoretical framework that allows for non-conservation of energy-momentum, with possible implications for the cosmological constant problem. It is then important to study the predictions of unimodular gravity in other gravitational regimes. In this work we study stellar dynamics under the assumption of non-conserved energy-momentum. We find that constant density objects can be as compact as Schwarzschild black holes. For polytropic objects, we find modifications due to the non-conservation of energy-momentum that lead to sizeable effects that could be constrained …
In this work we review the issue of imposing the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor as a necessary condition to recover the equivalence between the unimodular gravity and General Relativity (GR) equipped with a cosmological constant. This procedure is usually interpreted as an {\it ad hoc} imposition on the unimodular theory's structure. Whereas the consequences of avoiding the conservation of the total energy-momentum tensor has been already introduced in the literature, it has been not widely explored so far. We study an expanding universe sourced by a single effective perfect fluid …
Unimodular gravity is a modified theory with respect to general relativity by an extra condition that the determinant of the metric is fixed. Especially, if the energy-momentum tensor is not imposed to be conserved separately, a new geometric structure appears with potentially observational signatures. In this paper, we study tidal deformability of compact star in the unimodular gravity under the assumption of non-conserved energy-momentum tensor. Both the electric-type and magnetic-type quadrupole tidal Love numbers are calculated for neutron stars with polytrope model. It is found that the e…
An effective theory of gravity in the infrared is proposed, which involves the determinant of the metric relative to the determinant of a prior metric taken to be that of Minkowski spacetime. This effective theory can be interpreted as a generalization of unimodular gravity. In a cosmological context with ultrarelativistic or cold matter, the resulting field equations have only one solution, empty Minkowski spacetime (selected by the prior metric of the theory). The introduction of energy exchange between vacuum and matter gives rise to nonstatic cosmic solutions. It is found that Minkowski sp…
Ten conservation laws in useful polynomial form are derived from a Cartan form and Exterior Differential System (EDS) for the tetrad equations of vacuum relativity. The Noether construction of conservation laws for well posed EDS is introduced first, and an illustration given, deriving 15 conservation laws of the free field Maxwell Equations from symmetries of its EDS. The Maxwell EDS and tetrad gravity EDS have parallel structures, with their numbers of dependent variables, numbers of generating 2-forms and generating 3-forms, and Cartan character tables all in the ratio of 1 to 4. They have …
Unimodular gravity is characterized by an extra condition with respect to General Relativity: the determinant of the metric is constant. This extra condition leads to a more restricted class of invariance by coordinate transformation. Even though, if the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor is imposed in unimodular gravity, the General Relativity theory is recovered with an additional integration constant which is associated to the cosmological term $Λ$. However, if the energy-momentum tensor does not conserve separately, a new geometric structure appears with potentially observational s…
We use the conservation law of the stress-energy and spin tensors to study the motion of massive brane-like objects in Riemann-Cartan geometry. The world-sheet equations and boundary conditions are obtained in a manifestly covariant form. In the particle case, the resultant world-line equations turn out to exhibit a novel spin-curvature coupling. In particular, the spin of a zero-size particle does not couple to the background curvature. In the string case, the world-sheet dynamics is studied for some special choices of spin and torsion. As a result, the known coupling to the Kalb-Ramond antis…
The black hole entropy formula applied to local Rindler horizon at each spacetime point has been used in the literature to derive the Einstein field equation as an equation of state of a thermodynamical system of spacetime. In the present paper we argue that due to the key role of causal structure and discrete spacetime in this approach the natural framework is unimodular relativity rather than general relativity. It is shown that the equation of state is trace free unimodular relativity field equation that uniquely determines only the traceless stress tensor. Recent generalization to nonequil…
We study unimodular gravity in the context of cosmology, particularly some interesting consequences that might be able to describe the background cosmology and the late cosmic acceleration. We focus our attention on the hypothesis of \textit{non conservation of the energy momentum tensor}. This characteristic has an interesting outcome: we can obtain a modified Friedmann equation along with the acceleration equation and also new fluid equations related to a third order derivative of the scale factor, known in cosmography as the jerk parameter. As a consequence of this theory, it seems that rad…
We investigate the behaviour of the Tolman metrics within the formalism of the trace-free (or unimodular) gravity. While this approach is similar to the standard Einstein field equations, some subtlety arises. The effective number of independent field equations is reduced by one on account of the density and pressure appearing as an inseparable entity the inertial mass density. Further energy is not conserved within the trace-free theory but the conservation law may be supplemented to the field equations. This presentation of the field equations offers a different avenue to determine the densi…
The dynamics of brane-like extended objects in spacetimes with torsion is derived from the conservation equations of stress-energy and spin tensors. Thus obtained world-sheet equations are applied to macroscopic test membranes made of spinning matter. Specifically, we consider membranes with maximally symmetric distribution of stress-energy and spin. These are characterized by two constants only: the tension and spin magnitude. By solving the world-sheet equations, we discover a similarity between such membranes in Riemann-Cartan backgrounds, and string theory membranes in low-energy string ba…
A discrete space-time structure lying at about the Planck scale may become manifest in the form of very small violations of the conservation of the matter energy-momentum tensor. In order to include such kind of violations, forbidden within the General Relativity framework, the theory of unimodular gravity seems as the simplest option to describe the gravitational interaction. In the cosmological context, a direct consequence of such violation of energy conservation might be heuristically viewed a "diffusion process of matter (both dark and ordinary)" into an effective dark energy term in Eins…
Extensions of the gravity theory in order to obtain traceless field equations have been widely considered in the literature. The leading example of such class of theories is the unimodular gravity, but there are other possibilities like the mimetic gravity and the Rastall gravity with a coupling parameter $λ= 1/2$. The unimodular gravity proposal is a very interesting approach in other to address the cosmological constant problem. When coupled to matter such theories may imply that the energy-momentum tensor is not divergence free anymore. In this paper, a unimodular type theory will be develo…
We study classical dynamics of cylindrical membranes wrapped around the extra compact dimension of a $(D+1)$-dimensional Riemann-Cartan spacetime. The world-sheet equations and boundary conditions are obtained from the universally valid conservation equations of the stress-energy and spin tensors. Specifically, we consider membranes made of macroscopic matter with maximally symmetric distribution of spin. In the narrow membrane limit, the dimensionally reduced theory is obtained. It describes how effective strings couple to the effective $D$-dimensional geometry. The striking coincidence with …
In this letter, we consider the possibility of reconciling metric theories of gravitation with violation of the conservation of energy-momentum. Under some circumstances, this can be achieved in the context of unimodular gravity, and it leads to the emergence of an effective cosmological constant in Einstein's equation. We specifically investigate two potential sources of energy non-conservation ---non-unitary modifications of quantum mechanics, and phenomenological models motivated by quantum gravity theories with spacetime discreteness at the Planck scale--- and show that such locally neglig…
In Einstein-Cartan theory, by the use of the general Noether theorem, the general covariant angular-momentum conservation law is obtained with the respect to the local Lorentz transformations. The corresponding conservative Noether current is interpreted as the angular momentum tensor of the gravity-matter system including the spin density. It is pointed out that, assuming the tetrad transformation given by eq. (15), torsion tensor can not play a role in the conservation law of angular momentum.
In this paper, we formulate the Mimetic theory of gravity in first-order formalism for differential forms, i.e., the mimetic version of Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama (ECKS) gravity. We consider different possibilities on how torsion is affected by conformal transformations and discuss how this translates into the interpolation between two different conformal transformations of the spin connection, parameterized with a zero-form parameter $λ$. We prove that regardless of the type of transformation one chooses, in this setting torsion remains as a non-propagating field. We also discuss the conse…
The present paper continues the work of the authors [arXiv:1306.6887 [gr-qc]]. Here, we study generally covariant metric-torsion theories of gravity presented more concretely, setting that their Lagrangians are \emph{manifestly} generally covariant scalars. It is assumed that Lagrangians depend on metric tensor, curvature tensor, torsion tensor and its first and second covariant derivatives, besides, on an arbitrary set of other tensor (matter) fields and their first and second covariant derivatives. Thus, both the standard minimal coupling with the Riemann-Cartan geometry and non-minimal coup…
Thermodynamic constraints and future singularities in Unimodular Gravity driven by phantom and non-phantom fluids
Universidad de Santiago de Chile（圣地亚哥智利大学）；Center for Inter-disciplinary Research in Astrophysics and Space Exploration (CIRAS), Universidad de Santiago de Chile（圣地亚哥智利大学天体物理与空间探索跨学科研究中心）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso（瓦尔帕莱索天主教大学）；Universidad Veracruzana（韦拉克鲁斯大学）
In a higher-order modified teleparallel theory cosmological we present analytical cosmological solutions. In particular we determine forms of the unknown potential which drives the scalar field such that the field equations form a Liouville integrable system. For the determination of the conservation laws we apply the Cartan symmetries. Furthermore, inspired from our solutions, a toy model is studied and it is shown that it can describe the Supernova data, while at the same time introduces dark matter components in the Hubble function. When the extra matter source is a stiff fluid then we show…
We reformulate the general theory of relativity in the language of Riemann-Cartan geometry. We start from the assumption that the space-time can be described as a non-Riemannian manifold, which, in addition to the metric field, is endowed with torsion. In this new framework, the gravitational field is represented not only by the metric, but also by the torsion, which is completely determined by a geometric scalar field. We show that in this formulation general relativity has a new kind of invariance, whose invariance group consists of a set of conformal and gauge transformations, called Cartan…
We analyse the parity violation issue in the Poincaré gauge theory of gravity for the two classes of models which are built as natural extensions of the Einstein-Cartan theory. The conservation laws of the matter currents are revisited and we clarify the derivation of the effective Einstein field equation and the structure of the effective energy-momentum current for arbitrary matter sources.
Very recently, the authors of [PRL {\bf 118} (2017) 021102] have shown that violation of energy-momentum tensor (EMT) could result in an accelerated expansion state via appearing an effective cosmological constant, in the context of unimodular gravity. Inspired by this outcome, in this paper we investigate cosmological consequences of violation of the EMT conservation in a particular class of $f(R,T)$ gravity when only the pressure-less fluid is present. In this respect, we focus on the late time solutions of models of the type $f(R,T)=R+βΛ(-T)$. As the first task, we study the solutions when …
We analyse the Einstein-Cartan gravity in its standard form cal-R = R + cal-K^2, where cal-R and R are the Ricci scalar curvatures in the Einstein-Cartan and Einstein gravity, respectively, and cal-K^2 is the quadratic contribution of torsion in terms of the contorsion tensor cal-K. We treat torsion as an external (or a background) field and show that the contribution of torsion to the Einstein equations can be interpreted in terms of the torsion energy-momentum tensor, local conservation of which in a curved spacetime with an arbitrary metric or an arbitrary gravitational field demands a prop…
We review the Lagrangian formulation of Noether symmetries (as well as "generalized Noether symmetries") in the framework of Calculus of Variations in Jet Bundles, with a special attention to so-called "Natural Theories" and "Gauge-Natural Theories", that include all relevant Field Theories and physical applications (from Mechanics to General Relativity, to Gauge Theories, Supersymmetric Theories, Spinors and so on). It is discussed how the use of Poincare'-Cartan forms and decompositions of natural (or gauge-natural) variational operators give rise to notions such as "generators of Noether sy…
We show that the intrinsic angular momentum of matter in curved spacetime requires the metric-affine formulation of gravity, in which the antisymmetric part of the affine connection (the torsion tensor) is not constrained to be zero but is a variable in the principle of stationary action. Regarding the tetrad and spin connection (or the metric and torsion tensors) as independent variables gives the correct generalization of the conservation law for the total (orbital plus intrinsic) angular momentum to the presence of the gravitational field. The metric-affine formulation extends general relat…
Arbitrary diffeomorphically invariant metric-torsion theories of gravity are considered. It is assumed that Lagrangians of such theories contain derivatives of field variables (tensor densities of arbitrary ranks and weights) up to a second order only. The generalized Klein-Noether methods for constructing manifestly covariant identities and conserved quantities are developed. Manifestly covariant expressions are constructed without including auxiliary structures like a background metric. In the Riemann-Cartan space, the following \emph{manifestly generally covariant results} are presented: (a…
We study the cosmology of a quadratic metric-compatible torsionful gravity theory in the presence of a perfect hyperfluid. The gravitational action is an extension of the Einstein-Cartan theory given by the usual Einstein-Hilbert contribution plus all the admitted quadratic parity even torsion scalars and the matter action also exhibits a dependence on the connection. The equations of motion are obtained by regarding the metric and the metric-compatible torsionful connection as independent variables. We then consider a Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker background, analyze the conservation la…
Dark energy from neutrino interactions in Unimodular Gravity
Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional（墨西哥国立理工学院高等研究中心）；Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación（科技人文与技术创新秘书处）；Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares（国家核研究研究所）
Carter and Lichnerowicz have established that barotropic fluid flows are conformally geodesic and obey Hamilton's principle. This variational approach can accommodate neutral, or charged and poorly conducting, fluids. We show that, unlike what has been previously thought, this approach can also accommodate perfectly conducting magnetofluids, via the Bekenstein-Oron description of ideal magnetohydrodynamics. When Noether symmetries associated with Killing vectors or tensors are present in geodesic flows, they lead to constants of motion polynomial in the momenta. We generalize these concepts to…
In Einstein's gravitational theory, the spacetime is Riemannian, that is, it has vanishing torsion and vanishing nonmetricity (covariant derivative of the metric). In the gauging of the general affine group ${A}(4,R)$ and of its subgroup ${GL}(4,R)$ in four dimensions, energy--momentum and hypermomentum currents of matter are canonically coupled to the one--form basis and to the connection of a metric--affine spacetime with nonvanishing torsion and nonmetricity, respectively. Fermionic matter can be described in this framework by half--integer representations of the $\overline{SL}(4,R)$ coveri…
Dark energy genesis: modeling dissipative effects in primordial cosmology
Dipartimento di Fisica Ettore Pancini, Università di Napoli “Federico II”（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；INFN, Sezione di Napoli（意大利国家核物理研究所那不勒斯分部）；Aix Marseille Univ, Université de Toulon, CNRS, CPT（艾克斯-马赛大学、土伦大学、法国国家科学研究中心）；School of Physics and Astronomy, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学物理与天文学院）
The coupling of the electromagnetic field to gravity is an age-old problem. Presently, there is a resurgence of interest in it, mainly for two reasons: (i) Experimental investigations are under way with ever increasing precision, be it in the laboratory or by observing outer space. (ii) One desires to test out alternatives to Einstein's gravitational theory, in particular those of a gauge-theoretical nature, like Einstein-Cartan theory or metric-affine gravity. A clean discussion requires a reflection on the foundations of electrodynamics. If one bases electrodynamics on the conservation laws …
