Related papers: Torsional instanton effects in quantum gravity
We propose a new solution to the cosmological constant problem building on a nonperturbative quantum theory of gravity with torsional instantons. These pseudoparticles, which were recently found to exist in a first order formulation of…
Axions play a central role in inflationary model building and other cosmological applications. This is mainly due to their flat potential, which is protected by a global shift symmetry. However, quantum gravity is known to break global…
We argue that the electromagnetic $\theta$-term is a physical parameter of the Standard Model coupled to gravity. Specifically, in the context of 4-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory we show that there exist Euclidean field configurations…
Certain topological invariants of the moduli space of gravitational instantons are defined and studied. Several amplitudes of two and four dimensional topological gravity are computed. A notion of puncture in four dimensions, that is…
From the perspective of topological field theory we explore the physics beyond instantons. We propose the fluctons as nonperturbative topological fluctuations of vacuum, from which the self-dual domain of instantons is attained as a…
We find constrained instantons in Einstein gravity with and without a cosmological constant. These configurations are not saddle points of the Einstein-Hilbert action, yet they contribute to non-perturbative processes in quantum gravity. In…
The euclidean path integral remains, in spite of its familiar problems, an important approach to quantum gravity. One of its most striking and obscure features is the appearance of gravitational instantons or wormholes. These renormalize…
Riemann-Cartan space time $U_{4}$ is considered here. It has been shown that when we link topological Nieh-Yan density with the gravitational constant then we get Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian as a consequence.
In the present work we will introduce and prove a topological invariant term in General Relativity involving the torsion tensor that has never been showed before. Such a term is a slight modification of the Nieh-Yan four-form and likewise…
When it comes to the topological aspects, gravity may have profound effects even at the level of particle physics despite its negligibly small relative strength well below the Planck scale. In spite of this intriguing possibility,…
We show that noncommutative gauge theory in two dimensions is an exactly solvable model. A cohomological formulation of gauge theory defined on the noncommutative torus is used to show that its quantum partition function can be written as a…
Instantons and their quantisation in pure Yang-Mills theory formulated in the background of de Sitter spacetime represented by spatially-closed ($k = 1$) Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric are discussed. As for the classical treatment of the…
We present a novel approach to constructing gravitational instantons based on the observation that the gravitational action of general relativity in its teleparallel formulation can be expressed as a product of the torsion and excitation…
It is shown that for some particular value of the cosmological constant depending on the gauge coupling constant a continuous one-parameter family of Einstein-Yang-Mills wormholes exists which interpolates between the instanton and the…
We discuss the structure of a gravitational euclidean instanton obtained through coupling of gravity to electromagnetism. Its topology at fixed $t$ is $S^1\times S^2$. This euclidean solution can be interpreted as a tunnelling to a…
We study the Einstein-Chern-Simons gravity coupled to Yang-Mills-Higgs theory in three dimensional Euclidean space with cosmological constant. The classical equations reduce to Bogomol'nyi type first order equations in curved space. There…
The problem of topology change transitions in quantum gravity is discussed. We argue that the contribution of the Giddings-Strominger wormhole to the Euclidean path integral is pure imaginary. This is checked by two techniques: by the…
Instanton calculations are demonstrated from a viewpoint of twisted topological field theory. Various properties become manifest such that perturbative corrections are terminated at one-loop, and norm cancellations occur between bosonic and…
D-instantons of Type IIB string theory are Ramond-Ramond counterpart of Giddings-Strominger wormholes connecting two asymptotic regions of spacetime. Such wormholes, according to Coleman, might lead to spacetime topology change,…
The Barbero-Immirzi parameter is a one parameter quantization ambiguity underpinning the loop approach to quantum gravity that bears tantalizing similarities to the theta parameter of gauge theories such as Yang-Mills and QCD. Despite the…