Related papers: The Invisibility of Diffeomorphisms
Modified theories of gravity that explicitly break diffeomorphism invariance have been used for over a decade to explore open issues related to quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter. At the same time, the Standard-Model Extension…
A family of diffeomorphism-invariant Seiberg--Witten deformations of gravity is constructed. In a first step Seiberg--Witten maps for an SO(1,3) gauge symmetry are obtained for constant deformation parameters. This includes maps for the…
Starting from a knowledge of certain identities in the Lagrangian description, the diffeomorphism transformations of metric and connection are obtained for both the second order (metric) and the first order (Palatini) formulations of…
The issue of how to deal with the modular transformations -- large diffeomorphisms -- in (2+1)-quantum gravity on the torus is discussed. I study the Chern-Simons/connection representation and show that the behavior of the modular…
Fefferman and Graham showed some time ago that four dimensional conformal geometries could be analyzed in terms of six dimensional, ambient, Riemannian geometries admitting a closed homothety. Recently it was shown how conformal geometry…
The model of cylindrical gravitational waves is employed to work out and check a recent proposal in Ref. [11] how a diffeomorphism-invariant Hamiltonian dynamics is to be constructed. The starting point is the action by Ashtekar and Pierri…
In this thesis, the symmetry structure of gravitational theories at null infinity is studied further, in the case of pure gravity in four dimensions and also in the case of Einstein-Yang-Mills theory in $d$ dimensions with and without a…
We discuss the fate of diffeomorphism symmetry in discrete gravity. Diffeomorphism symmetry is typically broken by the discretization. This has repercussions for the observable content and the canonical formulation of the theory. It might…
We define a normalizable measure on the space of two-dimensional conformal field theories, which we interpret as a maximum ignorance ensemble. We test whether pure quantum gravity in AdS$_3$ is dual to the average over this ensemble. We…
Several approaches to the dynamics of loop quantum gravity involve discretizing the equations of motion. The resulting discrete theories are known to be problematic since the first class algebra of constraints of the continuum theory…
We study a two-dimensional dilaton gravity model related by a conformal transformation of the metric to the Callan-Giddings-Harvey-Strominger model. We find that most of the features and problems of the latter can be simply understood in…
We build a bridge between geometric group theory and topological dynamical systems by establishing a dictionary between coarse equivalence and continuous orbit equivalence. As an application, we give conceptual explanations for previous…
Conceptual difficulties in semiclassical and quantum gravity arise from diffeomorphism invariance of classical general relativity. With a motivation to shed some light on these difficulties, we study a class of toy models for which…
We construct a natural conformally invariant one-form of weight $-2k$ on any $2k$-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold which is closely related to the Pfaffian of the Weyl tensor. On oriented manifolds, we also construct natural…
The two-dimensional effective Polyakov action is often realized as the anomalous contributions of string theories and fermions coupled to gravity in two-dimensions. However, as a result of the reparameterization invariance, one finds that…
Topological field theories (TFTs) play an important role in characterizing the deep infrared (IR) of many quantum systems with a mass gap, as well as the global symmetries of quantum field theories (QFTs) decoupled from gravity. In…
Using variational considerations, we establish that there exists a new symmetric trace-free tensor conformal invariant of hypersurfaces embeddings in even dimensional conformal manifolds. This conformal invariant completes the family of…
In the present work, we wanted to find the possible way in order to make the equivalence between non-commutative and Finsler geometries as two useful mathematical tools. Based on this purpose, we were concerned to search this possibility by…
The infinite group of deformed diffeomorphisms of the spacetime continuum is put into the basis of the gauge theory of gravity. This gives rise to some new ways for unification of gravity with other gauge interactions.
Loop quantum gravity is an approach to quantum gravity that starts from the Hamiltonian formulation in terms of a connection and its canonical conjugate. Quantization proceeds in the spirit of Dirac: First one defines an algebra of basic…