Related papers: Gravity and Mirror Gravity in Plebanski Formulatio…
We propose that at the beginning of the universe gravity existed in a limbo either because it was switched off or because it was only conformally coupled to all particles. This picture can be reverse-engineered from the requirement that the…
Teleparallel gravity, an empirically equivalent counterpart to General Relativity, represents the influence of gravity using torsional forces. It raises questions about theory interpretation and underdetermination. To better understand the…
We investigate a formulation of continuum 4d gravity in terms of a constrained topological (BF) theory, in the spirit of the Plebanski formulation, but involving only linear constraints, of the type used recently in the spin foam approach…
We describe "small bodies" in a non-metric gravity theory previously studied by this author. The main dynamical field of the theory is a certain triple of two-forms rather than the metric, with only the spacetime conformal structure, not…
Among relativistic theories of gravitation the closest ones to general relativity are the scalar-tensor ones and these with Lagrangians being any function f(R) of the curvature scalar. A complete chart of relationships between these…
Current generalizations of the classical Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian formulation of General Relativity are reviewed. Some alternative variational principles are known to reproduce Einstein's gravitational equations, and should therefore be…
I consider theories of gravity built not just from the metric and affine connection, but also other (possibly higher rank) symmetric tensor(s). The Lagrangian densities are scalars built from them, and the volume forms are related to…
General relativity postulates that the gravity field is defined on a Riemannian manifold. The field equations are $R^\mu_\nu = 0$ i.e. Ricci's curvature tensor vanishes. The field equations have to be augmented by natural physical…
The unitarity of the 4D lattice theory of gravity in the case of the Minkowski signature is proved. The proof is valid only for lattices that conserve the number of degrees of freedom during time evolution. The Euclidean signature and the…
The first order Plebanski formulation of (complex) general relativity (GR) in terms of self-dual 2-forms admits a generalization, proposed by Krasnov, that is qualitatively different from other possible generalizations of GR in terms of…
We construct a duality manifest gravitational theory for the special linear group, ${\mathbf{SL}(N)}$ with $N{\neq 4}$. The spacetime is formally extended, to have the dimension $\textstyle{\frac{1}{2}} N(N-1)$, yet is `gauged'.…
We study the structure of scalar-tensor theories of gravity based on derivative couplings between the scalar and the matter degrees of freedom introduced through an effective metric. Such interactions are classified by their tensor…
We revisit Weyl's metrication (geometrization) of electromagnetism. We show that by making Weyl's proposed geometric connection be pure imaginary, not only are we able to metricate electromagnetism, an underlying local conformal invariance…
Topological gravity is the reduction of Einstein's theory to spacetimes with vanishing curvature, but with global degrees of freedom related to the topology of the universe. We present an exact Hamiltonian lattice theory for topological…
A new classical theory of gravitation within the framework of general relativity is presented. It is based on a matrix formulation of four-dimensional Riemann-spaces and uses no artificial fields or adjustable parameters. The geometrical…
Starting from a self-dual formulation of gravity, we obtain a noncommutative theory of pure Einstein theory in four dimensions. In order to do that, we use Seiberg-Witten map. It is shown that the noncommutative torsion constraint is solved…
There exist many four dimensional integrable theories. They include self-dual gauge and gravity theories, all their extended supersymmetric generalisations, as well the full (non-self-dual) N=3 super Yang-Mills equations. We review the…
The Horndeski Lagrangian brings together all possible interactions between gravity and a scalar field that yield second-order field equations in four-dimensional spacetime. As originally proposed, it only addresses phenomenology without…
We study a family of (possibly non topological) deformations of $BF$ theory for the Lie algebra obtained by quadratic extension of $\mathfrak{so}(3,1)$ by an orthogonal module. The resulting theory, called quadratically extended General…
We construct a four-dimensional (4D) gauge theory that propagates, unitarily, the five polarization modes of a massive spin-2 particle. These modes are described by a "dual" graviton gauge potential and the Lagrangian is 4th-order in…