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Chern-Simons models for gravity are interesting because they provide with a truly gauge-invariant action principle in the fiber-bundle sense. So far, their main drawback has largely been the perceived remoteness from standard General…
Dimensionally reduced spherically symmetric gravity and its generalization, generic 2-D dilaton gravity, provide ideal theoretical laboratories for the study of black hole quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. They are sufficiently simple…
Two Lagrangian functions are used to construct geometric field theories. One of these Lagrangians depends on the curvature of space, while the other depends on curvature and torsion. It is shown that the theory constructed from the first…
Variables adapted to the quantum dynamics of spherically symmetric models are introduced, which further simplify the spherically symmetric volume operator and allow an explicit computation of all matrix elements of the Euclidean and…
The emergence of loop quantum gravity over the past two decades has stimulated a great resurgence of interest in unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics. Amongst a number of appealing features of this approach are the intuitive…
Metric theories of gravity are studied, beginning with a general action that is quadratic in curvature and allows infinite inverse powers of the d'Alembertian operator, resulting in infrared non-local extensions of general relativity. The…
The gravitational dynamics and cosmological implications of three classes of recently introduced multi-scale spacetimes (with, respectively, ordinary, weighted and q-derivatives) are discussed. These spacetimes are non-Riemannian: the…
We present a uniform treatment of rigid supersymmetric field theories in a curved spacetime $\mathcal{M}$, focusing on four-dimensional theories with four supercharges. Our discussion is significantly simpler than earlier treatments,…
Modified gravity has attracted much attention over the last few years and remains a potential candidate for dark energy. In particular, the so-called viable f(R) gravity theories, which are able to both recover General Relativity (GR) and…
We consider quantum mechanics on constrained surfaces which have non-Euclidean metrics and variable Gaussian curvature. The old controversy about the ambiguities involving terms in the Hamiltonian of order hbar^2 multiplying the Gaussian…
In this work we study a more restricted class of quasi-topological gravity theories where the higher curvature terms have no contribution to the equation of motion on general static spherically symmetric metric where $g_{tt} g_{rr} \ne…
Conformal symmetries appear in many parts of physics and play a unique role in exploring the Universe. In this work, we consider the possibility of constructing conformal theories of gravity in the Symmetric Teleparallel Gravity framework,…
In these lectures we report recent work on the exact quantization of dimensionally reduced gravity, i.e. 2d non-linear (G/H)-coset space sigma-models coupled to gravity and a dilaton. Using methods developed in the context of flat space…
We argue that a conformally invariant extension of general relativity coupled to the Standard Model is the fundamental theory that needs to be quantized. We show that it can be treated by loop quantum gravity techniques. Through a gauge…
A potentially powerful approach to quantum gravity has been developed over the last few years under the name of Causal Dynamical Triangulations. Numerical simulations have given very interesting results in the cases of two, three and four…
All existing experimental results are currently interpreted using classical geometry. However, there are theoretical reasons to suspect that at a deeper level, geometry emerges as an approximate macroscopic behavior of a quantum system at…
Within the general framework of spatially covariant theories of gravity, we study the conditions for having only the two tensorial degrees of freedom. Generally, there are three degrees of freedom propagating in the theory, of which two are…
In this paper we investigate possible consistent ghost-free models containing massive spin 2 particles in three dimensions. We work in a constructive approach based on the frame-like gauge invariant description for such massive spin 2…
We construct a quintic quasi-topological gravity in five dimensions, i.e. a theory with a Lagrangian containing $\mathcal{R}^5$ terms and whose field equations are of second order on spherically (hyperbolic or planar) symmetric spacetimes.…
We consider Uncertainty Principles which take into account the role of gravity and the possible existence of extra spatial dimensions. Explicit expressions for such Generalized Uncertainty Principles in 4+n dimensions are given and their…