Related papers: Scalaron production in contracting astrophysical o…
We investigate scalar-tensor theories, motivated by dark energy models, in the strong gravity regime around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. In such theories general relativity is modified since the scalar field couples to…
The mystery of dark energy suggests that there is new gravitational physics on long length scales. Yet light degrees of freedom in gravity are strictly limited by Solar System observations. We can resolve this apparent contradiction by…
A cosmological constant in the regime of low space-time curvature is calculated in the recently proposed version of F(R) supergravity with a generic cubic function F. The F(R) supergravity is the N=1 supersymmetric extension of f(R)…
We analyze the most salient cosmological features of axions in extensions of the Standard Model with a gauged anomalous extra U(1) symmetry. The model is built by imposing the constraint of gauge invariance in the anomalous effective…
We investigate the gravitational production of scalar dark matter particles during the inflationary and reheating epochs. The oscillatory behavior of the curvature scalar $R$ during the reheating phase generates two different enhancement…
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity are extensions of General Relativity (GR) including an extra, nonminimally coupled scalar degree of freedom. A wide class of these theories, albeit indistinguishable from GR in the weak field regime,…
The accelerated expansion of the universe is a rather established fact in cosmology and many different models have been proposed as a viable explanation. Many of these models are based on the standard general relativistic framework of…
The $R+R^2$ model of gravity with the corresponding shallow potential in the Einstein frame is consistent with the observations. Recently, many efforts have been made to generalize the $R+R^2$ (Starobinsky) model of inflation or use other…
In scalar-tensor theories, spontaneous scalarization is a phase transition that can occur in ultra-dense environments such as neutron stars. The scalar field develops a non-trivial configuration once the stars exceeds a compactness…
String effective theories contain a dilaton scalar field which couples to gravity, matter and radiation. In general, particle masses will have different dilaton couplings. We can always choose a conformal frame in which baryons have…
The mass-varying neutrino scenario is analyzed for three trial quintessence potentials (Ferreira-Joyce, inverse exponential, and thawing oscillating). The neutrino mass is generated via Yukawa coupling to the scalar field which represents…
In this work, we derive novel constraints on scalar-tensor theories from neutrino physics. Spatial variations of the background scalar field effectively generate density and position-dependent Standard Model masses, including neutrinos.…
We derive the scalar potential in four spacetime dimensions from an eight-dimensional $(R+\gamma R^4-2\Lambda-F_4^2)$ gravity model in the presence of the 4-form $F_4$, with the (modified gravity) coupling constant $\gamma$ and the…
There is a conformal equivalence between power law $f(R)$ theories and scalar field theories in which the scalar degree of freedom evolves under the action of an exponential potential function. In the scalar field representation there is a…
Many classes of extended scalar-tensor theories predict that dynamical instabilities can take place at high energies, leading to the formation of scalarized neutron stars. Depending on the theory parameters, stars in a scalarized state can…
The unknown physical nature of the Dark Energy motivates in cosmology the study of modifications of the gravity theory at large distances. One of these types of modifications is to consider gravity theories, generally termed as $f(R)$. In…
We study gravitational waves in viable $f(R)$ theories under a non-zero background curvature. In general, an $f(R)$ theory contains an extra scalar degree of freedom corresponding to a massive scalar mode of gravitational wave. For viable…
Baryogenesis from the coherent production of a scalar condensate along a flat direction of the supersymmetric extension of the standard model (Affleck-Dine mechanism) is investigated. Two important effects are emphasized. First,…
In the light gluino scenario, squarks in the 100 GeV mass region can be copiously produced at the Tevatron without a second heavy particle. Their subsequent dijet decay into quark plus gluino leads to non-scaling structure in the inclusive…
We investigate the cosmological applications of new gravitational scalar-tensor theories, which are novel modifications of gravity possessing 2+2 propagating degrees of freedom, arising from a Lagrangian that includes the Ricci scalar and…