Related papers: Partial Masslessness and Conformal Gravity
A discussion is given of the conformal Einstein field equations coupled with matter whose energy-momentum tensor is trace-free. These resulting equations are expressed in terms of a generic Weyl connection. The article shows how in the…
We discuss the connection between Weyl$^2$ supergravity and superstrings and further discuss holography between 4-dimensional, ${\cal N}=4$ superconformal Weyl$^2$ supergravity and ${\cal N}=8$, higher spin-four theory on $AdS_5$. The…
When a small, uncharged, compact object is immersed in an external background spacetime, at zeroth order in its mass it moves as a test particle in the background. At linear order, its own gravitational field alters the geometry around it,…
The unphysical spin-2 massive degrees of freedom in higher derivative gravity may be either massive unphysical ghosts or tachyonic ghosts. In the last case there is no Planck-scale threshold protecting vacuum cosmological solutions from…
A simple modification to Einstein's theory of gravity in terms of a non-Riemannian connection is examined. A new tensor-variational approach yields field equations that possess a covariance similar to the gauge covariance of…
We present a general relativistic framework for studying gravitational effects in quantum mechanical phenomena. We concentrate our attention on the case of ultra-relativistic, spin-1/2 particles propagating in Kerr spacetime. The…
We present a new formulation for the canonical approach to conformal (Weyl-squared) gravity and its extension by the Einstein-Hilbert term and a nonminimally coupled scalar field. For this purpose we use a unimodular decomposition of the…
We consider conformal and scale-invariant gravities in d dimensions, with a special focus on pure $R^2$ gravity in the scale-invariant case. In four dimensions, the structure of these theories is well known. However, in dimensions larger…
We examine the generic theory of a partially massless (PM) spin-two field interacting with gravity in four dimensions from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the most general form of the Lagrangian, we first show that if such a theory…
The cosmological constant problem and the compatibility of gravity with quantum mechanics are the two most pressing problems in all of gravitational theory. While string theory nicely addresses the latter, it has so far failed to provide…
This short review examines recent progress in understanding dark matter, dark energy, and galactic halos using theory that departs minimally from standard particle physics and cosmology. Strict conformal symmetry (local Weyl scaling…
We provide a simple derivation of the equivalence between Einstein and Conformal Gravity (CG) with Neumann boundary conditions given by Maldacena. As Einstein spacetimes are Bach flat, a generic solution to CG would contain both Einstein…
We consider a consistent linear effective vielbein matter coupling without introducing the Boulware-Deser ghost in ghost-free massive gravity. This is achieved in the partially constrained vielbein formulation. We first introduce the…
For massive gravity in a de Sitter background one encounters problems of stability when the curvature is larger than the graviton mass. I analyze this situation from the path integral point of view and show that it is related to the…
In the last few years we have seen an increase interest on gravitational waves due to recent and striking experimental results confirming Einstein's general relativity once more. From the field theory point of view, gravity describes the…
We study partially massless gravity theory(PM gravity theory) and suggest an alternative way to add higher order interaction vertices to the theory. Rather than introducing self interaction vertices of the gravitational fields to the…
A Weyl invariant extension of Einstein gravity is studied. It simply consists in the group averaging of Einstein's action under Weyl transformations. Contradicting cherished beliefs, a conformal anomaly is found in the trace of the…
We give a detailed analysis of the particle spectrum and the perturbative unitarity of the recently introduced Weyl-invariant version of the new massive gravity in 2+1 dimensions. By computing the action up to second order in the…
The on shell equivalence of first order and second order formalisms for the Einstein-Hilbert action does not hold for those actions quadratic in curvature. It would seem that by considering the connection and the metric as independent…
The Weyl conformal tensor is the traceless component of the Riemann tensor and therefore, as is known, the information it contains does not appear explicitly in Einstein's equation. Following a rigorous mathematical treatment based on the…