Related papers: Unimodular quantum gravity and the cosmological co…
Quantum gravity has long been thought to be completely decoupled from experiments or observations. Although it is true that smoking guns are still missing, there are now serious hopes that quantum gravity phenomena might be tested. We…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
The Cosmological Constant Problem is re-examined from an effective field theory perspective. While the connection between gravity and particle physics has not been experimentally probed in the quantum regime, it is severely constrained by…
We consider models of gravitation that are based on unimodular general coordinate transformations (GCT). These transformations include only those which do not change the determinant of the metric. We treat the determinant as a separate…
Loop quantum gravity and cosmology are reviewed with an emphasis on evaluating the dynamics, rather than constructing it. The three crucial parts of such an analysis are (i) deriving effective equations, (ii) controlling the theory's…
Unimodular theory incorporating the Kaluza-Klein construction in five dimensions leads, after reduction to four dimensions, to a new class of scalar-tensor theory. The vacuum cosmological solutions display a bouncing, non singular behavior.…
The so called unimodular theory of gravitation is compared with general relativity in the quadratic (Fierz-Pauli) regime, using a quite broad framework, and it is argued that quantum effects allow in principle to discriminate between both…
Whereas the total energy in zero-point fluctuations of the particle physics vacuum gives rise to the cosmological constant problem, differences in the vacuum give rise to real physical phenomena, such as the Casimir effect. Hence we…
We study perturbative noncommutative quantum gravity by expanding the gravitational field about a fixed classical background. A calculation of the one loop gravitational self-energy graph reveals that only the non-planar graviton loops are…
Extensions of the gravity theory in order to obtain traceless field equations have been widely considered in the literature. The leading example of such class of theories is the unimodular gravity, but there are other possibilities like the…
Taking the quantization of electromagnetism as the paradigm, we show how this procedure cannot work for Einstein gravity. However, it does work for conformal gravity, a fourth-order derivative, renormalizable theory of gravity that Bender…
With this article, we initiate a systematic study of some of the symmetry properties of unimodular gravity, building on much of the known structure of general relativity, and utilising the powerful technology developed in that context. In…
We perform the Hamiltonian analysis of unimodular gravity in terms of the connection representation. The unimodular condition is imposed straightforwardly into the action with a Lagrange multiplier. After classifying constraints into first…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
We discuss the hypothesis of a fixed point for quantum gravity coupled to a scalar, in the limit where the scalar field goes to infinity, accompanied by a suitable scaling of the metric. We propose that no scalar potential is present for…
The traditional presentation of Unimodular Gravity (UG) consists on indicating that it is an alternative theory of gravity that restricts the generic diffeomorphism invariance of General Relativity. In particular, as often encountered in…
Quantum cosmology may restrict the class of gauge models which unify electroweak and strong interactions. In particular, if one studies the normalizability criterion for the one-loop wave function of the universe in a de Sitter background…
Unimodular gravity is an appealing approach to address the cosmological constant problem. In this scenario, the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate and the cosmological constant appears merely as an integration…
Recent astrophysical observations seem to indicate that the cosmological constant is small but nonzero and positive. The old cosmological constant problem asks why it is so small; we must now ask, in addition, why it is nonzero (and is in…