Related papers: Exploring Cartan gravity with dynamical symmetry b…
A distance can be measured by monitoring how much a wheel has rotated when rolled without slipping. This simple idea underlies the mathematics of Cartan geometry. The Cartan-geometric description of gravity consists of a SO(1,4) gauge…
We investigate the possibility for classical metric signature change in a straightforward generalization of the first order formulation of gravity, dubbed "Cartan gravity". The mathematical structure of this theory mimics the electroweak…
We investigate whether a spontaneously-broken gauge theory of the group $SU(2,2)$ may be a genuine competitor to General Relativity. The basic ingredients of the theory are an $SU(2,2)$ gauge field $A_{\mu}$ and a Higgs field $W$ in the…
Gravity is commonly thought of as one of the four force fields in nature. However, in standard formulations its mathematical structure is rather different from the Yang-Mills fields of particle physics that govern the electromagnetic, weak,…
An $SO(3,3)$ BF-type gauge theory is formulated on a six-dimensional spacetime of split signature $(3,3)$, interpreted as the pre-electroweak-symmetry-breaking phase. A MacDowell--Mansouri-type symmetry breaking to $SU(2)\times SU(2)$ is…
The gravitational interaction, as described by the Einstein-Cartan theory, is shown to emerge as the by-product of the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a gauge symmetry in a pre-geometric four-dimensional spacetime. Starting from a…
In Ashtekar's Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity, and in loop quantum gravity, Lorentz covariance is a subtle issue that has been strongly debated. Maintaining manifest Lorentz covariance seems to require introducing either…
Gravity is usually considered to be irrelevant as far as the physics of elementary particles is concerned and, in particular, in the context of the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) mechanism. We describe a version of the SSB mechanism in…
We construct effective field theories in which gravity is modified via spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. This is a gravitational analogue of the Higgs mechanism. These theories possess additional graviton modes and modified…
We propose a Lorentz-covariant Yang-Mills spin-gauge theory, where the function valued Dirac matrices play the role of a non-scalar Higgs-field. As symmetry group we choose $SU(2) \times U(1)$. After symmetry breaking a non-scalar…
{\it If gravity is a metric field by Einstein, it is a Higgs field.} Gravitation theory meets spontaneous symmetry breaking in accordance with the Equivalence Principle reformulated in the spirit of Klein-Chern geometries of invariants. In…
Effective gravitational field theories with background fields break local Lorentz symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance. Examples include Chern-Simons gravity, massive gravity, and the Standard-Model Extension (SME). The physical…
Gravitation theory meets spontaneous symmetry breaking when the structure group of the principal linear frame bundle $LX$ over a world manifold $X^4$ is reducible to the Lorentz group $SO(3,1)$. The physical underlying reason of this…
We study the details of the explicit and spontaneous symmetry breaking of the constrained 3BF action representing the Standard Model coupled to Einstein-Cartan gravity. First we discuss how each particular constraint breaks the original…
In gravity, breaking symmetry from a group G to a group H plays the role of describing geometry in relation to the geometry the homogeneous space G/H. The deep reason for this is Cartan's "method of equivalence," giving, in particular, an…
A number of approaches to gravitation have much in common with the gauge theories of the standard model of particle physics. In this paper, we develop the Hamiltonian formulation of a class of gravitational theories that may be regarded as…
We consider a Yang-Mills type gauge theory of gravity based on the conformal group SO(4,2) coupled to a conformally invariant real scalar field. The goal is to generate fundamental dimensional constants via spontaneous breakdown of the…
In these lectures I review the status of gravity from the point of view of the gauge principle and renormalization, the main tools in the toolbox of theoretical particle physics. In the first lecture I start from the old question "in what…
U(4) local transformations on the four Weyl spinors forming the isospin doublet of Dirac fermions are assumed as symmetries of the standard model. With the Lorentz transformations considered simultaneously, the symmetry group is enlarged in…
We propose a Lorentz-covariant Yang-Mills ``spin-gauge'' theory, where the function valued Pauli matrices play the role of a non-scalar Higgs-field. As symmetry group we choose $SU(2) \times U(1)$ of the 2-spinors describing…