Related papers: The Trace-Free Einstein Equations and inflation
The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…
It has been known for some time that the usual inference drawn from the observed near-flatness of the large-scale Universe - namely the existence of a cosmological "flatness problem", which is then taken as a partial, but key motivation for…
We construct a model in which the cosmological constant is canceled from the gravitational equations of motion. Our model relies on two key ingredients: a nonlocal constraint on the action, which forces the spacetime average of the…
An effective theory of gravity in the infrared is proposed, which involves the determinant of the metric relative to the determinant of a prior metric taken to be that of Minkowski spacetime. This effective theory can be interpreted as a…
The black hole area theorem suggests that classical general relativity is the thermodynamic limit of a quantum statistics. The degrees of freedom of the statistical theory cannot be the spacetime metric. We argue that the statistical theory…
We consider inflation in a universe with a positive cosmological constant and a nonminimally coupled scalar field, in which the field couples both quadratically and quartically to the Ricci scalar. When considered in the Einstein frame and…
We derive the Einstein equation from the condition that every small causal diamond is a variation of a flat empty diamond with the same free conformal energy, as would be expected for a near-equilibrium state. The attractiveness of gravity…
An alternative scenario about the phenomenology of primordial Universe is k-inflation. According to this concept, inflation can be achieved by nonstandard kinetic term of scalar field, namely the inflaton. In this project we focus on…
We investigate inflation and its scalar perturbation driven by a massive scalar field in the unimodular theory of gravity. We introduce a parameter $\xi$ with which the theory is invariant under general unimodular coordinate…
Treating the gravitational force on the same footing as the electroweak and strong forces, we present a quantum field theory of gravity based on spin and scaling gauge symmetries. A biframe spacetime is initiated to describe such a quantum…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
Within the framework of the scalar-tensor theory we consider a hill-climbing inflation, in which the effective Planck mass increases in time. We obtain the Einstein frame potential with infinitely long and flat plateau as we approach…
We study the infrared effective theory of gravity that stems from the quantum trace anomaly. Quantum fluctuations of the metric induce running of the cosmological constant and the Newton constant at cosmological scales. By imposing the…
We present an introduction to cosmic inflation in the framework of Palatini gravity, which provides an intriguing alternative to the conventional metric formulation of gravity. In the latter, only the metric specifies the spacetime…
The coupling between spin and torsion in the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity generates gravitational repulsion at very high densities, which prevents a singularity in a black hole and may create there a new universe. We show…
We consider the scale-invariant inflationary model studied in [1]. The Lagrangian includes all the scale-invariant operators that can be built with combinations of $R$, $R^2$ and one scalar field. The equations of motion show that the…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
We discuss the cosmological phenomenology of biscalar-tensor models displaying a maximally symmetric Einstein-frame kinetic sector and constructed on the basis of scale symmetry and volume-preserving diffeomorphisms. These theories contain…
It is shown that the inflationary era in early universe is realized due to the effect of backreaction of quantized matter fields. In fact we start by quantizing a free scalar field in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker space-time, and the field…
The general thermodynamic analysis of the quantum vacuum, which is based on our knowledge of the vacua in condensed-matter systems, is consistent with the Einstein earlier view on the cosmological constant. In the equilibrium Universes the…