Related papers: Background Fields and Gravity
Gravitational instability in classical Jeans theory, General Relativity, and modified gravity is considered. The background density increase leads to a faster growth of perturbations in comparison with the standard theory. The transition to…
In a previous work we showed that, in a suitable setting, one can use diffeomorphism invariance in order to derive gravitational field equations from boundary terms of the gravitational action. Standing by our results we reply here to a…
We explain how the spacetime diffeomorphism in the classical bosonic closed string field theory (SFT) is represented as $L_\infty$ gauge transformations in weakly curved backgrounds. In particular, we demonstrate the explicit map between…
We present the first steps needed for an analysis of the perturbations that occur in the cosmology associated with the conformal gravity theory. We discuss the implications of conformal invariance for perturbative coordinate gauge choices,…
We study the low energy effective theory describing gravity with broken spatial diffeomorphism invariance. In the unitary gauge, the Goldstone bosons associated with broken diffeomorphisms are eaten and the graviton becomes a massive spin-2…
The recent formulation of locally covariant quantum field theory may open the way towards a background independent perturbative formulation of Quantum Gravity.
To guarantee the stability of the cosmological constant sector against radiative corrections coming from quantum matter fields, one of the most natural ingredients to invoke is the symmetry under scale transformations of the gravitational…
It is shown that target space diffeomorphism invariance of a generic Lagrangian for a set of scalar fields leads to an analog of Einstein equations for the geometry of a level set of these fields.
We consider background fields within the gravitational sector of the Standard-Model Extension (SME) in a cosmological setting. Our analysis is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the consistency of nondynamical backgrounds in…
We study the extent to which diffeomorphism invariance restricts the properties of the primordial perturbations in single scalar field models. We derive a set of identities that constrain the connected correlators of the cosmological…
The history of general relativity suggests that in absence of experimental data, constructing a theory on philosophical first principles can lead to a very useful theory as well as to ground-breaking insights about physical reality. The two…
One of the many conceptual difficulties in the development of quantum gravity is the role of a background geometry for the structure of quantum field theory. To some extent the problem can be solved by the principle of local covariance. The…
Diffeomorphism invariance is often considered to be a hallmark of the theory of general relativity (GR). But closer analysis reveals that this cannot be what makes GR distinctive. The concept of diffeomorphism invariance can be defined in…
We explore a background-independent theory of composite gravity. The vacuum expectation value of the composite metric satisfies Einstein's equations (with corrections) as a consistency condition, and selects the vacuum spacetime. A…
We review the connection between noncommutative field theories and gravity. When the noncommutativity is induced by the Moyal product we can use the Seiberg-Witten map in order to deal with ordinary fields. We then show that the effect of…
We study the consequences of the modification of the phase space structure of General Relativity imposed by breaking the full diffeomorphism invariance but retaining the time foliation preserving diffeomorphisms. We examine the different…
We put forward the idea that in addition to diffeomorphism invariance of general relativity (GR) the gravitational interaction is invariant under arbitrary scale-deformations of the metric field. In addition, we assume that the scaling…
A general diffeomorphism invariant SU(2) gauge theory is a gravity theory with two propagating polarizations of the graviton. We develop this description of gravity, in particular for future applications to the perturbative quantization.…
Quantum General Relativity (QGR), sometimes called Loop Quantum Gravity, has matured over the past fifteen years to a mathematically rigorous candidate quantum field theory of the gravitational field. The features that distinguish it from…
While general relativity possesses local Lorentz invariance, both canonical quantum gravity and string theory suggest that Lorentz invariance may be broken at high energies. Broken Lorentz invariance has also been postulated as an…