Related papers: Beyond Lovelock gravity: Higher derivative metric …
We study the condition that the theory is unitary and stable in three-dimensional gravity with most general quadratic curvature, Lorentz-Chern-Simons and cosmological terms. We provide the complete classification of the unitary theories…
We discuss theories of gravity with independent metric (or frame field) and connection, from the point of view of effective field theory. We count the parity-even Lagrangian terms of dimension up to four and give explicit bases for the…
We generalize the known equivalence between higher order gravity theories and scalar tensor theories to a new class of theories. Specifically, in the context of a first order or Palatini variational principle where the metric and connection…
Theories of gravity invariant under those diffeomorphisms generated by transverse vectors, $\pd_\m\xi^\m=0$ are considered. Such theories are dubbed transverse, and differ from General Relativity in that the determinant of the metric, $g$,…
A discussion of the number of degrees of freedom, and their dynamical properties, in higher derivative gravitational theories is presented. The complete non-linear sigma model for these degrees of freedom is exhibited using the method of…
We study new classes of metric transformations in the context of scalar-tensor theories, which involve both higher derivatives of the scalar field and derivatives of the metric itself. In general, such transformations are not invertible as…
We study the degrees of freedom of the metric in a general class of higher derivative gravity models, which are interesting in the context of quantum gravity as they are (super)renormalizable. First, we linearize the theory for a flat…
Many effective field theories describing gravity cannot arise from an underlying theory based on Riemann geometry or its extensions to include torsion and nonmetricity but may instead emerge from another geometry or may have a nongeometric…
We study the conservative dynamics of spinless compact objects in a general effective theory of gravity which includes a metric and an arbitrary number of scalar fields, through $\mathcal{O}(G^{3})$. Departures from Einstein gravity, which…
The Newtonian limit of fourth-order gravity is worked out discussing its viability with respect to the standard results of General Relativity. We investigate the limit in the metric approach which, with respect to the Palatini formulation,…
Theories with higher order time derivatives generically suffer from ghost-like instabilities, known as Ostrogradski instabilities. This fate can be avoided by considering "degenerate" Lagrangians, whose kinetic matrix cannot be inverted,…
In gravity theories derived from a f(R) Lagrangian, matter is usually supposed to be minimally coupled to the metric, which hence defines a ``Jordan frame.'' However, since the field equations are fourth order, gravity possesses an extra…
The usual Chern-Simons extension of Einstein gravity theory consists in adding a squared Riemann contribution to the Hilbert Lagrangian, which means that a square-curvature term is added to the linear-curvature leading term governing the…
Recently, motivated by certain loop quantum gravity inspired corrections, it was shown that for spherically symmetric midisuperspace models infinitely many second derivative theories of gravity exist (as revealed by the presence of three…
This thesis covers several developments performed in metric-affine gravity. This alternative framework extends General Relativity by considering a more general connection than the one induced by the metric (i.e., arbitrary torsion and…
We re-examine the problem of parity violation in single field inflation. We look for a systematic way to parametrically approach the scale at which maximal parity violation occurs, which is where we expect to find the presence of the Chern…
In this paper we show how to translate into tensorial language the Chern-Weil theorem for the Lorentz symmetry, which equates the difference of the Euler densities of two manifolds to the exterior derivative of a transgression form. For…
When 4-dimensional general relativity is extended by a 3-dimensional gravitational Chern-Simons term an apparent violation of diffeormorphism invariance is extinguished by the dynamical equations of motion for the modified theory. The…
Here we consider a metric-affine theory of gravity in which the gravitational Lagrangian is the scalar curvature. The matter action is allowed to depend also on the torsion and the nonmetricity, which are considered as the field variables…
Disformal theories of gravity are scalar-tensor theories where the scalar couples derivatively to matter via the Jordan frame metric. These models have recently attracted interest in the cosmological context since they admit accelerating…