Related papers: Cosmological Singularities and a Conjectured Gravi…
In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of eleven-dimensional supergravity on a manifold with boundary, which is believed to be relevant to the strong coupling limit of the $E_8\times E_8$ heterotic string. Gauge and gravitational…
Supersymmetric solutions of supergravity theories, and consequently metrics with special holonomy, have played an important role in the development of string theory. We describe how a Lorentzian manifold is either completely reducible, and…
We demonstrate that the Carroll limit of general relativity coupled to matter captures the chaotic mixmaster dynamics of near-singularity limits. Zooming in on the behavior of general relativity close to spacelike singularities reveals rich…
We highlight the structure and properties of an abstract approach to quantum cosmology and gravity, dubbed $SU(\infty)$-QGR. Beginning from the concept of the Universe as an isolated quantum system, the main axiom of is the existence of an…
We describe relations between hyperbolic geometry and codimension two knots or, more exactly, between varieties of conjugacy classes of discrete faithful representations of the fundamental groups of hyperbolic n-manifolds M into…
We discuss some phenomenological aspects of gauged supersymmetric $\gs$--models on homogeneous coset-spaces $\ESO$ and $SO(10)/U(5)$ which are some of the most interesting for phenomenology. We investigate in detail the vacuum…
The self-consistent matter coupling is found in a broad class of minimally modified gravity theories which was discovered recently. All constraints in the theories remain first class and thus a graviton has only 2 local degrees of freedom.…
In this dissertation we study two well known gravitational scenarios in which singularities may appear; the final state of gravitational collapse and the late time evolution of the universe. In the first scenario, we study a spherically…
The gauge symmetry $SU(5) \times U(1)_\chi$ is the unique maximal subgroup of SO(10) which retains manifest unification at $M_{GUT}$ of the Standard Model gauge couplings, especially if low scale supersymmetry is present. The spontaneous…
We present a new cubic theory of gravity in five dimensions which has second order traced field equations, analogous to BHT new massive gravity in three dimensions. Moreover, for static spherically symmetric spacetimes all the field…
The early Cosmology driven by a single scalar field, both massless and massive, in the context of Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity, is explored. We show the existence of nonsingular solutions of bouncing and loitering type (depending…
In this review we present a thoroughly comprehensive survey of recent work on modified theories of gravity and their cosmological consequences. Amongst other things, we cover General Relativity, Scalar-Tensor, Einstein-Aether, and Bimetric…
We study the cosmology of general massive gravity theories with five propagating degrees of freedom. This large class of theories includes both the case with a residual Lorentz invariance as the cases with simpler rotational invariance. We…
In three spacetime dimensions, general relativity drastically simplifies, becoming a ``topological'' theory with no propagating local degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, many of the difficult conceptual problems of quantizing gravity are…
We present the locally supersymmetric formulation of unimodular gravity theory in D (1\le D \le 11) dimensions, namely supergravity theory with the metric tensor whose determinant is constrained to be unity. In such a formulation, the usual…
We construct an asymptotic series for a general solution of the Einstein equations near a sudden singularity. The solution is quasi isotropic and contains nine independent arbitrary functions of the space coordinates as required by the…
We explicitly prove that a class of finite quantum gravitational theories (in odd as well as in even dimension) is actually a range of anomaly-free conformally invariant theories in the spontaneously broken phase of the conformal Weyl…
The effective action in four dimensions resulting from the ten-dimensional N=1 heterotic supergravity coupled to N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills upon dimensional reduction over nearly-Kaehler manifolds is discussed. Nearly-Kaehler manifolds…
We study a five-dimensional non-relativistic gravity theory whose action is composed of a gravitational sector and a sector of matter where the gravitational sector is given by the so called Newton--Chern--Simons gravity and where the…
I review the nature of three-dimensional collapse in the Zeldovich approximation, how it relates to the underlying nature of the three-dimensional Lagrangian manifold and naturally gives rise to a hierarchical structure formation scenario…