Related papers: Can Gravity Probe B usefully constrain torsion gra…
The Einstein equivalence principle is certainly a key element in the development of new enhanced theories of gravity. Although being an important building block in Einstein's general relativity, theoretically predicted violations of its…
In this work we have investigated various properties of a spinning gyroscope in the context of Horndeski theories. In particular, we have focused on two specific situations --- (a) when the gyroscope follows a geodesic trajectory and (b)…
Whereas semiclassical gravity is based on the semiclassical Einstein equation with sources given by the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of quantum fields, stochastic semiclassical gravity is based on the Einstein-Langevin…
We review some recent developments in the conformal gravity theory that has been advanced as a candidate alternative to standard Einstein gravity. As a quantum theory the conformal theory is both renormalizable and unitary, with unitarity…
Reflective equilibrium between physics and philosophy, and between GR and particle physics, is fruitful and rational. I consider the virtues of simplicity, conservatism, and conceptual coherence, along with perturbative expansions. There…
A fourth order generalized f(R) gravity theory (FOG) is considered with the Einstein-Hilbert action $R+aR^{2}+bR_{\mu \nu}R^{\mu \nu},$ $R_{\mu \nu}$ being Ricci\'{}s tensor and R the curvature scalar. The field equations are applied to…
Tensor-scalar theories of gravitation are commonly employed as extensions of General Relativity that allow to describe a much wider phenomenology. They are also naturally generated as low energy limit of higher-dimensional or unified…
Starting with the MacDowell-Mansouri formulation of gravity with a $SO(4,1)$ gauge group, we introduce new parameters into the action to include the non-dynamical Holst term, and the topological Nieh-Yan and Pontryagin classes. Then, we…
Spin foam models of quantum gravity are based on Plebanski's formulation of general relativity as a constrained BF theory. We give an alternative formulation of gravity as BF theory plus a certain potential term for the B-field. When the…
The Einstein-Cartan-Saa theory of torsion modifies the spacetime volume element so that it is compatible with the connection. The condition of connection compatibility gives constraints on torsion, which are also necessary for the…
We carry out a covariant calculation of the measurable relativistic effects in an orbiting gyroscope experiment. The experiment, currently known as Gravity Probe B, compares the spin directions of an array of spinning gyroscopes with the…
We show that, in the weak field limit, at large separations, in sharp contrast to General Relativity (GR), all massive gravity theories predict distance-dependent spin alignments for spinning objects. For all separations GR requires…
Rotation of a body, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, generates a "force" on other matter; in Newton's gravitational theory only the mass of a body produces a force. This phenomenon, due to currents of mass, is known as…
We discuss the possibility of constraining theories of gravity in which the connection is a fundamental variable by searching for observational consequences of the torsion degrees of freedom. In a wide class of models, the only modes of the…
We investigate the motion of a spinning test particle in a spatially-flat FRW-type space-time in the framework of the Einstein-Cartan theory. The space-time has a torsion arising from a spinning fluid filling the space-time. We show that…
Recent experimental work has determined that free falling $^{87}$Rb atoms on Earth, with vertically aligned spins, follow geodesics, thus apparently ruling out spin--gravitation interactions. It is showed that while some spinning matter…
We examine the role of consistency with causality and quantum mechanics in determining the properties of gravitation. We begin by examining two different classes of interacting theories of massless spin 2 particles -- gravitons. One…
Gravity is derived from an entropic action coupling matter fields with geometry. The fundamental idea is to relate the metric of Lorentzian spacetime to a quantum operator, playing the role of an renormalizable effective density matrix and…
Spin is one fundamental property of microscopic particles. A lot of theoretical work has postulated the possible coupling between spin and gravitation, which could result in the violation of equivalence principle. In our recent joint…
Torsion appears in a natural way in modern formulations of the gravitational theories. In this work we study several aspects of the interplay between the Standard Model and a classical gravitational background with torsion. In particular we…