A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in new and simple ways many results, among others, that gravitational corrections tend to make Minkowski or Anti de Sitter false vacua more stable semiclassically or that higher barriers increase vacuum lifetime. The approach also offers a very clean picture of gravitational quenching of vacuum decay and its parametric dependence on the features of a potential and allows to study the BPS domain-walls between vacua in critical cases. Special attention is devoted to supersymmetric potentials and to the discussion of near-critical vacuum decays, for which it is shown how the new method can be usefully applied beyond the thin-wall approximation.
Spherical energy shells in General Relativity tend to collapse due to gravitational effects and/or due to tension effects. Shell stabilization may be achieved by modifying the gravitational properties of the background spacetime. Thus, gravastars consist of stiff matter shells with an interior deSitter space and an exterior Schwarzshild spacetime whose attractive gravity balances the interior repulsive gravity of the interior deSitter spacetime leading to a stable stiff matter shell. Similar stabilization effects may be achieved by considering rotating shells. Here we study the stability of sl…
The Higgs effective potential becomes unstable at approximately $10^{11}$ GeV, and if only standard model interactions are considered, the lifetime $τ$ of the electroweak vacuum turns out to be much larger than the age of the Universe $T_U$. It is well known, however, that $τ$ is extremely sensitive to the presence of unknown new physics: the latter can enormously lower $τ$. This poses a serious problem for the stability of our Universe, demanding for a physical mechanism that protects it from a disastrous decay. We have found that there exists a universal stabilizing mechanism that naturally …
We use the 5-th time action formalism introduced by Halpern and Greensite to stabilize the unbounded Euclidean 4-D gravity in two simple minisuperspace models. In particular, we show that, at the semiclassical level ($\hbar \rightarrow 0$), we still have as a leading saddle point the $S^4$ solution and the Coleman peak at zero cosmological constant, for a fixed De Witt supermetric. At the quantum (one-loop) level the scalar gravitational modes give a positive semi-definite Hessian contribution to the 5-D partition function, thus removing the Polchinski phase ambiguity.
We show that a possible resolution to the stabilization of an extra spatial dimension (radion) can be obtained solely in the context of gravitational dynamics itself without the necessity of introducing any external stabilizing field. In this scenario the stabilized value of the radion field gets determined in terms of the parameters appearing in the higher curvature gravitational action. Furthermore, the mass of the radion field and its coupling to the standard model fields are found to be in the weak scale implying possible signatures in the TeV scale colliders. Some resulting implications a…
Quantum gravity is often expected to solve both the singularity problem and the information-loss problem of black holes. This article presents an example from loop quantum gravity in which the singularity problem is solved in such a way that the information-loss problem is made worse. Quantum effects in this scenario, in contrast to previous non-singular models, do not eliminate the event horizon and introduce a new Cauchy horizon where determinism breaks down. Although infinities are avoided, for all practical purposes the core of the black hole plays the role of a naked singularity. Recent d…
Gravity and thermal energy are universal phenomena which compete over the stabilization of astrophysical systems. The former induces an inward pressure driving collapse and the latter a stabilizing outward pressure generated by random motion and energy dispersion. Since a contracting self-gravitating system is heated up one may wonder why is gravitational collapse not halted in all cases at a sufficient high temperature establishing either a gravo-thermal equilibrium or explosion. Here, based on the equivalence between mass and energy, we show that there always exists a temperature threshold b…
Gravity does not naturally fit well with canonical quantization. Affine quantization is an alternative procedure that is similar to canonical quantization but may offer a positive result when canonical quantization fails to offer a positive result. Two simple examples given initially illustrate the power of affine quantization. These examples clearly point toward an affine quantization procedure that vastly simplifies a successful quantization of general relativity.
We examine holographic complexity in the doubly holographic model introduced in [arXiv:2006.04851][arXiv:2010.00018] to study quantum extremal islands. We focus on the holographic complexity=volume (CV) proposal for boundary subregions in the island phase. Exploiting the Fefferman-Graham expansion of the metric and other geometric quantities near the brane, we derive the leading contributions to the complexity and interpret these in terms of the generalized volume of the island derived from the induced higher-curvature gravity action on the brane. Motivated by these results, we propose a gener…
Università Roma Tre（罗马第三大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma 3（意大利国家核物理研究所罗马三分所）；Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica Francesco Severi, Gruppo Nazionale di Fisica Matematica（弗朗切斯科·塞韦里高等数学国立研究所数学物理全国小组）；Instituto de Estructura de la Materia, CSIC（材料结构研究所，西班牙高等科学研究委员会）
A connection is made between a model for strongly interacting vector bosons and the spontaneously broken theory of gravity. The theory contains effectively no Higgs particle, but should have strong interactions at the electroweak scale. Some speculations about the nature of these interactions and possible experimental signatures are discussed.
A review is made of recent efforts to find relations between the commutation relations which define a noncommutative geometry and the gravitational field which remains as a shadow in the commutative limit.
We review here the main advances made by using effective field theories (EFTs) in classical gravity, with notable focus on those unique to the EFTs of post-Newtonian (PN) gravity. We then proceed to overview the various prospects of using field theory to study the real-world gravitational wave (GW) data, as well as to ameliorate our fundamental understanding of gravity at all scales, by going from the EFTs of PN gravity to modern advances in scattering amplitudes, including computational techniques and intriguing duality relations between gauge and gravity theories.
Teleparallel based cosmological models provide a description of gravity in which torsion is the mediator of gravitation. Several extensions have been made within the so-called Teleparallel equivalent of general relativity which is equivalent to general relativity at the level of the equations of motion where attempts are made to study the extensions of this form of gravity and to describe more general functions of the torsion scalar $T$. One of these extensions is $f(T,ϕ)$ gravity; $T$ and $ϕ$ respectively denote the torsion scalar and scalar field. In this work, the dynamical system analysis …
Following the same steps made for a scalar field in a parallel publication, we propose a class of perturbative theories of quantum gravity based on fractional operators, where the kinetic operator of the graviton is either made of fractional derivatives or a covariant fractional d'Alembertian. The classical action for each theory is constructed and the equations of motion are derived. Unitarity and renormalizability of theories with a fractional d'Alembertian are also considered. We argue that unitarity and power-counting renormalizability never coexist, although in some cases one-loop unitary…
We study perturbative noncommutative quantum gravity by expanding the gravitational field about a fixed classical background. A calculation of the one loop gravitational self-energy graph reveals that only the non-planar graviton loops are damped by oscillating internal momentum dependent factors. The noncommutative quantum gravity perturbation theory is not renormalizable beyond one loop for matter-free gravity and all loops for matter interactions. Comments are made about the nonlocal gravitational interactions produced by the noncommutative spacetime geometry.
Solutions to a scalar-tensor (dilaton) quantum gravity theory, interacting with quantized matter, are described. Dirac quantization is frustrated by quantal anomalies in the constraint algebra. Progress is made only after the Wheeler--DeWitt equation is modified by quantal terms, which eliminate the anomaly. More than one modification is possible, resulting in more than one `physical' spectrum in the quantum theory, corresponding to the given classical model.
There are theories which implement the idea that the constants of nature may be "time dependent." These introduce new fields representing "evolving constants," in addition to physical fields. We argue that dynamical matter coupling constants can arise naturally in non-perturbative matter-gravity theories, after a choice of global time is made. We illustrate the idea in scalar field cosmology with spatial volume as a global clock, and compute the time dependence of the scalar mass and self-interaction coupling constants.
In this paper we deliver the proofs for the claims, made in a companion paper, concerning the avoidance of cosmological curvature singularities in in full Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG).
We classify all the first-order vertices of gravity consistently coupled to a system of 2-form gauge fields by computing the local BRST cohomology H(s|d) in ghost number 0 and form degree n. The consistent deformations are at most linear in the undifferentiated two-form, confirming the previous results of [1] that geometrical theories constructed from a nonsymmetric gravity theory are physically inconsistent or trivial. No assumption is made here on the degree of homogeneity in the derivatives nor on the form of the gravity action.
A gravitational field can be defined in terms of a moving frame, which when made noncommutative yields a preferred basis for a differential calculus. It is conjectured that to a linear perturbation of the commutation relations which define the algebra there corresponds a linear perturbation of the gravitational field. This is shown to be true in the case of a perturbation of Minkowski space-time.
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity that embrace conformal coupling to the scalar curvature are the focal point of cosmology on discussions of inflation and late-time accelerating universe. Although there exists a stringent nucleo-synthesis constraint on conformal gravity, one can formulate how to evade this difficulty by modifying the standard particle theory action consistently with the principles of gauge invariant quantum field theory. It is shown that stronger gravity at early epochs of cosmological evolution than previously thought of is inevitable in a class of conformal gravity models. T…
Models of inflation in which the Higgs field is non-minimally coupled to gravity lead, after a recaling of the metric, to a complicated expression for the potential of the inflaton field. Nevertheless, this potential produces the desired features, both theoretical and experimental, after some approximations are made. In this note, we also allow for a modification of the Higgs kinetic term in such a way that the resulting potential for the inflaton field is, without any approximation, of the simplest form after the rescaling of the metric.
An analogy between the subtraction procedure in the Gibbons-Hawking Euclidean path integral approach to Horizon's Thermodynamics and the Casimir effect is shown. Then a conjecture about a possible Casimir nature of the Gibbons-Hawking subtraction is made in the framework of Sakharov's induced gravity. In this framework it appears that the degrees of freedom involved in the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy are naturally identified with zero--point modes of the matter fields. Some consequences of this view are sketched.
An interesting proposal has recently been made to extend massive gravity models beyond dRGT by a disformal transformation of the metric. In this Letter we want to note that it can be viewed as a mimetic extension of dRGT gravity which enormously simplifies the Hamiltonian analysis. In particular, pure gravity sector is equivalent to the usual dRGT gravity coupled to a constrained scalar field. And we also give some comments about possible matter couplings.
We study the beta functions of the quartic and Yukawa couplings of General Relativity and Unimodular Gravity coupled to the $λϕ^4$ and Yukawa theories with masses. We show that the General Relativity corrections to those beta functions as obtained from the 1PI functional by using the standard MS multiplicative renormalization scheme of Dimensional Regularization are gauge dependent and, further, that they can be removed by a non-multiplicative, though local, field redefinition. An analogous analysis is carried out when General Relativity is replaced with Unimodular Gravity. Thus we show that a…
A review is made of recent efforts to add a gravitational field to noncommutative models of space-time. Special emphasis is placed on the case which could be considered as the noncommutative analog of a parallelizable space-time. It is argued that, at least in this case, there is a rigid relation between the noncommutative structure of the space-time on the one hand and the nature of the gravitational field which remains as a `shadow' in the commutative limit on the other.
This article is an overview of the contributions numerical relativity has made to our understanding of strong field gravity, to be published in the book "General Relativity and Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective", commemorating the 100th anniversary of general relativity.
Recently, Horava formulated a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity that reduces to general relativity at large distances but violates Lorentz invariance at small distances. The absolute time involved in this theory allows to define an objective notion of particles associated with quantization of fields in classical gravitational backgrounds. The Unruh effect and other observer-dependent notions of particles in curved space are interpreted as effects caused by interaction between the objective vacuum and the measuring apparatus made up of objective particles.
We use variational methods to calculate quasilocal energy quantum corrections. A comparison with the effective potential calculated at quadratic order is made by means of gaussian wave functionals. The method is a particular case of the effective action for composite operators used in quantum field theory. In pure gravity the method is applied for the first time. Implications on the foam-like scenario are discussed.
We show that, in the context of the two-field measure theory, any k-essence model leads to the existence of a fluid made of non-relativistic matter and cosmological constant that would explain the dark matter and dark energy problem at the same time. On the other hand, kinetic gravity braiding models can lead to different behaviors, such as phantom dark energy, stiff matter, and a cosmological constant. For stiff matter, there even exists the case where the scalar field does not have any effect in the dynamics of the Universe.
A discursive, non-technical, analysis is made of some of the basic issues that arise in almost any approach to quantum gravity, and of how these issues stand in relation to recent developments in the field. Specific topics include the applicability of the conceptual and mathematical structures of both classical general relativity and standard quantum theory. This discussion is preceded by a short history of the last twenty-five years of research in quantum gravity, and concludes with speculations on what a future theory might look like.
We consider an extended theory of gravity with Lagrangian $\mathcal{L} = f(R,{\bf T}^{(n)})$, with ${\bf T}^{(n)}$ being a $2n$-th order invariant made of contractions of the energy-momentum tensor. When $n=1$ this theory reduces to $f(R,T)$ gravity, where $T$ accounts for the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. We study the gravitational wave polarization modes, from which it results that when the matter Lagrangian contains dynamical scalar fields minimally coupled to the geometry, further polarization modes arise with respect to General Relativity. Finally we show that the motion for test p…
We present a compact theorem which reveals the fact that static spatially regular massive scalar fields with nonminimal coupling to gravity cannot form spherically symmetric asymptotically flat horizonless matter configurations. In particular, the no-go theorem rules out the existence of boson stars made of static scalar fields with generic values of the physical parameter $ξ$ which quantifies the coupling between the spacetime curvature and the massive bosonic fields.
Professor M. C. Polivanov and I met only a few times, during my infrequent visits to the-then Soviet Union in the 1970's and 1980's. His hospitality at the Moscow Steclov Institute made the trips a pleasure, while the scientific environment that he provided made them professionally valuable. But it is the human contact that I remember most vividly and shall now miss after his death. At a time when issues of conscience were both pressing for attention and difficult/dangerous to confront, Professor Polivanov made a deep impression with his quiet but adamant commitment to justice. I can only gues…
We show that, contrary to the claim made in arXiv:0911.1299, the extended Horava gravity model proposed in arXiv:0909.3525 does not suffer from a strong coupling problem. By studying the observational constraints on the model we determine the bounds on the scale of the ultraviolet modification for which the proposal yields a phenomenologically viable, renormalizable and weakly coupled model of quantum gravity.
Recent progress in our understanding of the black hole information paradox has lead to a new prescription for calculating entanglement entropies, which involves special subsystems in regions where gravity is dynamical, called \textit{quantum extremal islands}. We present a simple holographic framework where the emergence of quantum extremal islands can be understood in terms of the standard Ryu-Takayanagi prescription, used for calculating entanglement entropies in the boundary theory. Our setup describes a $d$-dimensional boundary CFT coupled to a ($d$-1)-dimensional defect, which are dual to…
We construct a new vacuum for loop quantum gravity, which is dual to the Ashtekar-Lewandowski vacuum. Because it is based on BF theory, this new vacuum is physical for $(2+1)$-dimensional gravity, and much closer to the spirit of spin foam quantization in general. To construct this new vacuum and the associated representation of quantum observables, we introduce a modified holonomy-flux algebra which is cylindrically consistent with respect to the notion of refinement by time evolution suggested in [1]. This supports the proposal for a construction of a physical vacuum made in [1,2], also for …
Any theory can be made Weyl invariant by introducing a dilaton. It is shown how to construct renormalization group equations for gravity that maintain this property. Explicit calculations are given only in the simplest approximation, namely for the one loop beta functions of a dilaton conformally coupled to a dynamical metric, but the results have wider validity. This formalism could be used to define the meaning of a theory with a position-dependent cutoff: it is equivalent to a theory with a constant cutoff, but a conformally related metric.
A detailed reexamination is made of the exact operator formalism of two-dimensional Liouville quantum gravity in Minkowski spacetime with the cosmological term fully taken into account. Making use of the canonical mapping from the interacting Liouville field into a free field, we focus on the problem of how the Liouville exponential operator should be properly defined. In particular, the condition of mutual locality among the exponential operators is carefully analyzed, and a new solution, which is neither smoothly connected nor relatively local to the existing solution, is found. Our analysis…
