Related papers: Pure connection gravity at one loop: Instanton bac…
We give a description of gravitons in terms of an SL(2,C) connection field. The gauge-theoretic Lagrangian for gravitons is simpler than the metric one. Moreover, all components of the connection field have the same sign in front of their…
When the full connection of Weyl conformal gravity is varied instead of just the metric, the resulting vacuum field equations reduce to the vacuum Einstein equation, up to the choice of local units, if and only if the torsion vanishes. This…
General Relativity (GR) exists in different formulations. They are equivalent in pure gravity but generically lead to distinct predictions once matter is included. After a brief overview of various versions of GR, we focus on metric-affine…
Aspects of the full theory of loop quantum gravity can be studied in a simpler context by reducing to symmetric models like cosmological ones. This leads to several applications where loop effects play a significant role when one is…
In four space-time dimensions, there exists a special infinite-parameter family of chiral modified gravity theories. They are most properly described by a connection field, with space-time metric being a secondary and derived concept. All…
In this paper we revisit the motivation and construction of a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism, following Weyl's insights regarding the appealing potential connection between the gauge invariance of electromagnetism and the…
We quantise the new connection formulation of D+1 dimensional General Relativity developed in our companion papers by Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) methods. It turns out that all the tools prepared for LQG straightforwardly generalise to the…
A new variational approach for general relativity and modified theories of gravity is presented. In addition to the metric tensor, two independent affine connections enter the action as dynamical variables. In the matter action the…
General Relativity can be formulated in terms of a spatially Weyl invariant gauge theory called Shape Dynamics. Using this formulation, we establish a "bulk/bulk" duality between gravity and a Weyl invariant theory on spacelike Cauchy…
A recent proposal for gauge-invariant observables in inflation [R. Brunetti et al., JHEP 1608 (2016) 032] is examined. We give a generalisation of their construction to general background spacetimes. In flat space, we calculate one-loop…
We study the one-loop effective action for a generic two-dimensional dilaton gravity theory conformally coupled to $N$ matter fields. We obtain an explicit expression for the effective action in the weak-coupling limit under a suitable…
Effective field theories describing gravity coupled to matter are investigated, allowing for operators of arbitrary mass dimension. Terms violating local Lorentz and diffeomorphism invariance while preserving internal gauge symmetries are…
We present a scale-invariant theory, conformal gravity, which closely resembles the geometrodynamical formulation of general relativity (GR). While previous attempts to create scale-invariant theories of gravity have been based on Weyl's…
We analyse the gauge-dependence of the effective action in an interacting quantum theory of gravitational and matter fields. An explicit off-shell result is obtained in a general background gauge at one-loop order, which reduces in a…
We reconsider a gauge theory of gravity in which the gauge group is the conformal group SO(4,2) and the action is of the Yang-Mills form, quadratic in the curvature. The resulting gravitational theory exhibits local conformal symmetry and…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
The structure of the divergences for transverse theories of gravity is studied to one-loop order. These theories are invariant only under those diffeomorphisms that enjoy unit Jacobian determinant (TDiff), so that the determinant of the…
The metric-affine variational principle is applied to generate teleparallel and symmetric teleparallel theories of gravity. From the latter is discovered an exceptional class which is consistent with a vanishing affine connection. Based on…
We deduce, in a general background gauge, the counter-term Lagrangian for pure quantum gravity to one-loop order. As an application, we evaluate the leading quantum correction to the classical gravitational potential, generated by the…
In this paper, we introduce and motivate the studies of Quantum Weyl Gravity (also known as Conformal Gravity). We discuss some appealing features of this theory both on classical and quantum level. The construction of the quantum theory is…