Related papers: On Cosmological Implications of Gravitational Trac…
General Relativity (GR) is a phenomenologically successful theory that rests on firm foundations, but has not been tested on cosmological scales. The advent of dark energy (and possibly even the requirement of cold dark matter), has…
The standard cosmological model is challenged by an ever-growing collection of observations, which invites (and stimulates) inquiry into possible additions and/or alterations. One such alteration comes from letting cosmic isotropy -- as…
Quantum cosmology is traditionally formulated in a minisuperspace setting, implicitly averaging fields over space to obtain homogeneous models. For universal reasons related to the uncertainty principle, quantum corrections then depend on…
The concept of exotic charged dust is introduced here to represent dark matter. The term "exotic" means that the dust is not composed of normal matter, and the charge--for lack of a better term--is not an electric charge. It is also shown…
The standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem is based on one critical assumption---the spacetime is homogeneous and isotropic, which is true only on cosmological scales. However, this problem is caused by extremely small…
We argue that 4D gravity is drastically modified at distances larger than the horizon scale, due to the large infrared quantum fluctuations of the conformal part of the metric. The infrared dynamics of the conformal factor is generated by…
The question of building a local diff-invariant effective gravitational action for the trace anomaly is reconsidered. General Relativity (GR) combined with the existing action for the trace anomaly is an inconsistent low energy effective…
The presence of cosmological fluctuations influences the background cosmology in which the perturbations evolve. This back-reaction arises as a second order effect in the cosmological perturbation expansion. The effect is cumulative in the…
In a recently proposed theory, the cosmological constant (CC) does not curve spacetime in our universe, but instead gets absorbed into another universe endowed with its own dynamical metric, nonlocally coupled to ours. Thus, one achieves a…
I review several different calculations, coming from string theory, nonperturbative quantum gravity and analyses of black holes that lead to predictions of phenomena that would uniquely be signatures of quantum gravitational effects. These…
We present a comprehensive formalism to derive precise expressions for the induced gravity of the braneworld, assuming the dynamics of the Dirac-Nambu-Goto type. The quantum fluctuations of the brane at short distances give rise to…
The Poincare Gauge Theory of gravitation with a Lagrangian quadratic in the field strengths is applied to a classical cosmological model. It predicts a constant value of the non-riemannian curvature scalar, which acts as a cosmological…
In this paper, we explore an idea of having Newton's constant change its value depending on the curvature scale involved. Such modification leads to a particular scalar-tensor gravity theory, with the Lagrangian derived from renormalization…
A Bianchi type-I cosmological model in the presence of a magnetic flux along a cosmological string is considered. The first objective of this study is to investigate Einstein equations using a tractable assumption usually accepted in the…
The trace-free version of the Einstein Gravitational equations, essentially equivalent to unimodular gravity, can solve the troubling issue of the huge discrepancy between quantum field theory estimates of the vacuum energy density and the…
The common nature of the dark sector - dark energy and dark matter - as shown in [1] follows readily from the consideration of generalized Newtonian potential as a weak-field General Relativity. That generalized potential satisfying the…
It has been suggested that antiscreening effects due to the running of the gravitational constant G might provide a partial solution to the dark matter mystery. It has also been hypothesized that renormalization group scaling…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
We investigate the effects of negative pressure induced by dark energy (cosmological constant or quintessence) on the dynamics at various astrophysical scales. Negative pressure induces a repulsive term (antigravity) in Newton's law which…
We generalize the standard model of particle physics such it displays global scale invariance. The gravitational action is also suitably modified such that it respects this symmetry. This model is interesting since the cosmological constant…