Related papers: Explicit versus Spontaneous Diffeomorphism Breakin…
Spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz symmetry occurs when a local vector or tensor field acquires a nonzero vacuum expectation value. The effects of such breaking are examined in the context of gravity theory. These include an associated…
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…
Diffeomorphism invariance breaking has been investigated in the literature in several contexts, including emergent General Relativity (GR). If GR emerges from an underlying theory without diffeomorphism invariance, there may be small…
The idea that local Lorentz invariance might be violated due to new physics that goes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and Einstein's General Relativity has received a great deal of interest in recent years. At the same time,…
Violations of spacetime symmetries have recently been identified as promising signatures for physics underlying the Standard Model. The present talk gives an overview over various topics in this field: The motivations for spacetime-symmetry…
We study the cosmological implications of gravity models which break diffeomorphisms (Diff) invariance down to transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff). We start from the most general gravitational action involving up to quadratic terms in…
We study conformal gravity as an alternative theory of gravitation. For conformal gravity to be phenomenologically viable requires that the conformal symmetry is not manifest at the energy scales of the other known physical forces. Hence we…
Spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking can occur when the dynamics of a tensor field cause it to take on a non-zero expectation value in vacuo, thereby providing one or more "preferred directions" in spacetime. Couplings between such fields…
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…
Effective field theories which describe the coupling between gravity and matter fields have recently been extended to include terms with operators of non-minimal mass dimension. These terms preserve the usual gauge symmetries but may…
Gravitational theories with Lorentz violation must account for a number of possible features in order to be consistent theoretically and phenomenologically. A brief summary of these features is given here. They include evasion of a no-go…
A self consistent effective field theory of modified gravity has recently been proposed with spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. The symmetry is broken by a vector field with the wrong-sign mass term and it has been shown to…
We consider diffeomorphism violation, which is parameterized by nondynamical background fields of the gravitational Standard-Model Extension (SME), and study its effects on the time evolution of the Universe. Our goal is to identify…
One common way to define spontaneous symmetry breaking involves explicit symmetry breaking. This definition can be used in any approach to Effective Field Theory, from perturbation theory to lattice simulations. It allows us to study the…
In this talk, we review recent results in testing spacetime symmetries in gravitational physics. Topics discussed include new signals for hypothetical Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetry violations in short-range gravity tests. We review…
The incompatibility of explicit diffeomorphism violation with Riemannian geometry within the gravitational Standard-Model Extension (SME) is revisited. We review two methods of how to deal with this problem. The first is based on an…
Looking for ideas for a fundamental physics that could almost work by itself, not making but mild assumptions, we are inspired by the earlier work by Astri Kleppe and myself. We showed that assuming diffeomorphism symmetry in addition to…
We consider a class of field theories with a four-vector field $A_{\mu}(x)$ in addition to other fields supplied with a global charge symmetry - theories which have partial gauge symmetry in the sense of only imposing it on those terms in…
Gravitational properties of a hedge-hog type topological defect in two extra dimensions are considered in General Relativity employing a vector as the order parameter. All previous considerations were done using the order parameter in the…
We complement investigations of the gauge structure of general relativity with an analysis of the physical consequences of the spontaneous breaking of diffeomorphism invariance which manifests itself in e.g. the socalled Einstein hole…