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A quantum gravity theory which becomes renormalizable at short distances due to a spontaneous symmetry breaking of Lorentz invariance and diffeomorphism invariance is studied. A breaking of Lorentz invariance with the breaking patterns…
The local Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetries of Einstein's gravitational theory are spontaneously broken by a Higgs mechanism by invoking a phase transition in the early Universe, at a critical temperature $T_c$ below which the symmetry…
We investigate the status of the gravitational arrow of time in the case of a spherical collapse of a fluid that conducts heat and radiates energy. In particular, we examine the results obtained by W. B. Bonnor in his 1985 paper where he…
All the laws of physics are time-reversible. Time arrow emerges only when ensembles of classical particles are treated probabilistically, outside of physics laws, and the entropy and the second law of thermodynamics are introduced. In…
Our Universe has an arrow of time. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, entropy has been increasing ever since the Big Bang. The fact that matter is in thermal equilibrium in the very early Universe, as indicated by the…
The second law of thermodynamics points to the existence of an `arrow of time', along which entropy only increases. This arises despite the time-reversal symmetry (TRS) of the microscopic laws of nature. Within quantum theory, TRS underpins…
We propose a thermodynamically motivated measure of gravitational entropy based on the Bel-Robinson tensor, which has a natural interpretation as the effective super-energy-momentum tensor of free gravitational fields. The specific form of…
The concept of entropy forms the backbone of the principles of thermodynamics. R.C. Tolman initiated the correlation between gravity and thermodynamics. The development of black hole thermodynamics and the generalized second law of…
Penrose conjectured a connection between entropy and Weyl curvature of the Universe. This is plausible, as the almost homogeneous and isotropic Universe at the onset of structure formation has negligible Weyl curvature, which then grows…
Here the Weyl curvature hypothesis is examined using the gravitational entropy (GE). We have considered the family of C-metric accelerating black holes and evaluated their corresponding gravitational entropy. Then we studied the GE in some…
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this…
(abbreviated) The statistical mechanics of self-gravitating systems is a long-held puzzle. In this work, we employ a phenomenological entropy form of ideal gas, first proposed by White & Narayan, to revisit this issue. By calculating the…
We study a theory where the presence of an extra spin-two field coupled to gravity gives rise to a phase with spontaneously broken Lorentz symmetry. In this phase gravity is massive, and the Weak Equivalence Principle is respected. The…
Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modelling of natural laws. Relativity theory shows that the comparison of times measured by different clocks depends on their relative motion and on the strength of the…
We argue that in an inflationary cosmology a consequence of the lack of time translational invariance is that spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry and Goldstone's theorem \emph{do not} imply the existence of \emph{massless}…
We investigate the arrow of time problem in the context of gravitational collapse of radiating stars in higher dimensions for both neutral and charged matter. The interior spacetime is described by a shear-free spherically symmetric metric…
Motivated by the notion that the mathematics of gravity can be reproduced from a statistical requirement of maximal entropy, we study the consequence of introducing an entropic source term in the Einstein-Hilbert action. For a spatially…
The universe today, with structure such as stars, galaxies and black holes, seems to have evolved from a very homogeneous initial state. From this it appears as if the entropy of the universe is decreasing, in violation of the second law of…
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…
We attempt to find a function that characterizes gravitational clumping and that increases monotonically as inhomogeneity increases. We choose $S = ln\Omega$ as the candidate ``gravitational entropy'' function, where $\Omega$ is the…