Related papers: Mapping pure gravity to strings in three-dimension…
It is well known that string theory can be formulated as two dimensional gravity coupled to matter. In the 2d gravity formulation the central charge of the matter together with a hidden dimension from the conformal factor or Liouville mode…
We consider some questions of naturalness which arise when one considers conventional field theories in the presence of gravitation: the problem of global symmetries, the strong CP problem, and the cosmological constant problem. Using…
We discuss quadratic gravity where terms quadratic in the curvature tensor are included in the action. After reviewing the corresponding field equations, we analyze in detail the physical propagating modes in some specific backgrounds.…
String theory is a quantum theory that reproduces the results of General Relativity at long distances but is completely different at short distances. Mathematically, string theory is based on a very new -- and little understood -- framework…
The presence of a constant background antisymmetric tensor for open strings or D-branes forces the space-time coordinates to be noncommutative. This effect is equivalent to replacing ordinary products in the effective theory by the deformed…
We find a new non BPS solution in $N=2$ $D=4$ gauged supergravity coupled to $U(1)$ gauge fields and matter. It consists in a closed universe with two extremal black holes of equal size, surrounding two singularities. They have opposite…
We make a number of remarks on linearized gravity with cosmological constant in any dimension, which, we argue, can be useful in a quantum gravity framework. For this purpose we assume that the background space-time metric corresponds to…
We discuss three applications of a gauge theory of gravity to rotating astrophysical systems. The theory employs gauge fields in a flat Minkowski background spacetime to describe gravitational interactions. The iron fluorescence line…
The loop representation of quantum gravity has many formal resemblances to a background-free string theory. In fact, its origins lie in attempts to treat the string theory of hadrons as an approximation to QCD, in which the strings…
We investigate the asymptotic symmetry algebra of (2+1)-dimensional higher spin, anti-de Sitter gravity. We use the formulation of the theory as a Chern-Simons gauge theory based on the higher spin algebra hs(1,1). Expanding the gauge…
We discuss the general question of which conformal field theories have dual descriptions in terms of quantum gravity theories on anti-de Sitter space. We analyze in detail the case of a deformed product of n conformal field theories (each…
Starting from the Siklos waves in general relativity with a cosmological constant, interpreted as gravitational waves on the anti-de Sitter background, a new class of exact torsion waves is constructed in the framework of three-dimensional…
Quantum theories of gravity are generally expected to have some degree of non-locality, with familiar local physics emerging only in a particular limit. Perturbative quantum gravity around backgrounds with isometries and compact Cauchy…
A field theory is constructed in the context of parameterized absolute parallelism geometry. The theory is shown to be a pure gravity one. It is capable of describing the gravitational field and a material distribution in terms of the…
In order to get a better understanding of holographic properties of gravitational theories with a vanishing cosmological constant, we analyze in detail the relation between asymptotically anti-de Sitter and asymptotically flat spacetimes in…
Gravitational physics is arguably better understood in the presence of a negative cosmological constant than a positive one, yet there exist strong technical similarities between the two settings. These similarities can be exploited to…
Gravitational entropy arises in string theory via coarse graining over an underlying space of microstates. In this review we would like to address the question of how the classical black hole geometry itself arises as an effective or…
Pure three-dimensional gravity in anti-de Sitter space can be formulated as an SL(2,R) $\times $ SL(2,R) Chern-Simons theory, and the latter can be reduced to a WZW theory at the boundary. In this paper we show that AdS$_3$ gravity with…
I investigate two discrete models of random geometries, namely simplicial quantum gravity and quantum string theory. In four-dimensional simplicial quantum gravity, I show that the addition of matter gauge fields to the model is capable of…
I consider a three-dimensional string theory whose action, besides the standard area term, contains one of the form $\int_{\Sigma} \epsilon_{\mu\nu\sigma} X^{\mu} d X^{\nu} \wedge d X^{\sigma}$. In the case of closed strings this extra term…