We study the bound on the compactness of a stellar object in pure Lovelock theories of arbitrary order in arbitrary spacetime dimensions, involving electromagnetic field. The bound we derive for a generic pure Lovelock theory, reproduces the known results in four dimensional Einstein gravity. Both the case of a charged shell and that of a charge sphere demonstrates that for a given spacetime dimension, stars in general relativity are more compact than the stars in pure Lovelock theories. In addition, as the strength of the Maxwell field increases, the stellar structures become more compact, i.e., the radius of the star decreases. In the context of four dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity as well, an increase in the strength of the Gauss-Bonnet coupling (behaving as an effective electric charge), increases the compactness of the star. Implications are discussed.
We define a "holographic limit" of Lancsoz-Lovelock theories at the Lagrangian level which gives three-dimensional modified gravity theories. We also show that this limit applies to more general classes of theories in higher dimensions provided that they admit the holographic c-theorem.
We study the initial value problem for Lovelock and Horndeski theories of gravity. We show that the equations of motion of these theories can be written in a form that, at weak coupling, is strongly hyperbolic and therefore admits a well-posed initial value problem. This is achieved by introducing a new class of "modified harmonic" gauges for general relativity.
Higher-derivative gravity theories, such as Lovelock theories, generalize Einstein's general relativity (GR). Modifications to GR are expected when curvatures are near Planckian and appear in string theory or supergravity. But can such theories describe gravity on length scales much larger than the Planck cutoff length scale? Here we find causality constraints on Lovelock theories that arise from the requirement that the equations of motion (EOM) of perturbations be hyperbolic. We find a general expression for the "effective metric" in field space when Lovelock theories are perturbed around so…
The Horndeski theories are extended into the Lovelock gravity theory. When the canonical scalar field is uniquely kinetically coupled to the Lovelock tensors, it is named after Lovelock scalar field. The Lovelock scalar field model is a subclass of the new Horndeski theories. A most attractive feature of the Lovelock scalar field is its equation of motion is second order. So it is free of ghosts. We study the cosmology of Lovelock scalar field in the background of $7$ dimensional spacetime and present a class of cosmic solutions. These solutions reveal the physics of the scalar field is rather…
We derive an expression for conserved charges in Lovelock AdS gravity for solutions having $k$-fold degenerate vacua, making manifest a link between the degeneracy of a given vacuum and the nonlinearity of the energy formula. We show for a black hole solution to the field equations on a branch of multiplicity $k$ that its mass comes from an expression that contains the product of $k$ Weyl tensors. We prove that all divergent contributions of the type (Weyl)$^q$, with $1\le q<k$, are suppressed. Our conserved charge definition is a natural generalization of the Conformal Mass by Ashtekar, Magno…
In this thesis, we explore the possibility to define black hole mass in terms of the Weyl tensor for the entire family of Lovelock-AdS gravity theories. The level of degeneracy $k$ of the corresponding vacuum fixes the number of curvatures that should appear in the energy formula. Therefore, the charge expression which is a polynomial of maximal degree in the curvature, can be consistently truncated to an order $k$ in the Weyl tensor. In particular, for the maximally degenerate case in odd dimensions (Chern-Simons AdS) the expression identically vanishes and the mass must come from the formula…
It is well known that the Reissner-Norstrom solution of Einstein-Maxwell theory cannot be cylindrically extended to higher dimension, as with the black hole solutions in vacuum. In this paper we show that this result is circumvented in Lovelock gravity. We prove that the theory containing only the quadratic Lovelock term, the Gauss-Bonnet term, minimally coupled to a $U(1)$ field, admits homogeneous black string and black brane solutions characterized by the mass, charge and volume of the flat directions. We also show that theories containing a single Lovelock term of order $n$ in the Lagrangi…
We study the entropy evolution of black holes in Lovelock gravity by formulating a thermodynamic generalization of null Raychaudhuri equation. We show that the similarity between the expressions of entropy change of the black hole horizon due to perturbation and that of a fluid, which is out of equilibrium, transcends beyond general relativity to the Lovelock class of theories. Exploiting this analogy we find that the shear and bulk viscosities for the black holes in Lovelock theories exactly match with those obtained in the membrane paradigm and also from holographic considerations.
There has recently been an increasing interest in regularizations of Lovelock-Lanczos gravity (LLG) in four dimensions, in which dimensional poles and possibly counter-terms are introduced to compensate the vanishing of the Lovelock field equations in critical and lower dimensions. In this paper, we review and extend some of these results. We first find a class of LLG theories whose perturbative expansion around a given (A)dS vacuum can be regularized up to arbitrary order, the simplest one being close to Lovelock gravities with a unique vacuum. If well-defined, these models might be interpret…
We consider theories describing the dynamics of a four-dimensional metric, whose Lagrangian is diffeomorphism invariant and depends at most on second derivatives of the metric. Imposing degeneracy conditions we find a set of Lagrangians that, apart form the Einstein-Hilbert one, are either trivial or contain more than two degrees of freedom. Among the partially degenerate theories, we recover Chern-Simons gravity, endowed with constraints whose structure suggests the presence of instabilities. Then, we enlarge the class of parity violating theories of gravity by introducing new "chiral scalar-…
We construct an exact anisotropic star model with a linear barotropic equation of state and with Finch-Skea potential within the framework of pure Lovelock gravity. A comparison with the corresponding Einstein model in a suitable limit is easily deduced. Evidently higher curvature effects induced by the Lovelock contributions generate lower densities, pressures, surface tensions and anisotropy factors when compared to its Einstein counterpart. The maximum moment of inertia is attained for the Einstein case and hence it may be inferred that Lovelock effects soften the equation of state. The mod…
A four-dimensional regularization of Lovelock-Lanczos gravity up to an arbitrary curvature order is considered. We show that Lovelock-Lanczos terms can provide a non-trivial contribution to the Einstein field equations in four dimensions, for spherically symmetric and Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker spacetimes, as well as at first order in perturbation theory around (anti) de Sitter vacua. We will discuss the cosmological and black hole solutions arising from these theories, focusing on the presence of attractors and their stability. Although curvature singularities persist for any finite …
We present an alternative derivation of the gravitational field equations for Lovelock gravity starting from the Newton's law, which is closer in spirit to the thermodynamic description of gravity. As a warm up exercise, we have explicitly demonstrated that projecting the Riemann curvature tensor appropriately and taking a cue from Poisson's equation, the Einstein's equations immediately follow. The above derivation naturally generalizes to Lovelock gravity theories where an appropriate curvature tensor satisfying the symmetries as well as the Bianchi derivative properties of the Riemann tenso…
Brown-York quasilocal energy in Lanczos-Lovelock gravity and black hole horizons
在广义相对论中，准定域能量的标准候选者是布朗-约克能量，它本质上是一个二维的表面积分，其外在曲率位于平坦时空的类空超曲面的两个边界上。几年前，我们中的一个人已经证明，黑洞视界是由引力能和非引力能均分来定义的。利用准定域Brown-York能的上述定义，我们验证了广义相对论中关于静态带电和带电轴对称黑洞的均分猜想。我们进一步将Brown-York形式推广到Lanczos-Lovelock引力理论的所有阶，并验证了d= 2 m +2维纯Lovelock荷电黑洞的猜想，其中m是Lovelock作用量的阶数.事实证明，均分猜想只适用于纯洛夫洛克，而不适用于爱因斯坦-洛夫洛克，黑洞。
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 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…
