Related papers: Towards the Raychaudhuri Equation Beyond General R…
We present a brief review on the Raychaudhuri equations. Beginning with a summary of the essential features of the original article by Raychaudhuri and subsequent work of numerous authors, we move on to a discussion of the equations in the…
We consider here the genericity aspects of spacetime singularities that occur in cosmology and in gravitational collapse. The singularity theorems (that predict the occurrence of singularities in general relativity) allow the singularities…
Teleparallel Gravity (TG) describes gravitation as a torsional- rather than curvature-based effect. As in curvature-based constructions of gravity, several different formulations can be proposed, one of which is the Teleparallel equivalent…
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
The existence of spacetime singularities is one of the biggest problems of nowadays physics. According to Penrose, each physical singularity should be covered by a "cosmic censor" which prevents any external observer from perceiving their…
The existence of black holes in the Universe is nowadays established on the grounds of a blench of astrophysical observations, most notably those of gravitational waves from binary mergers and the imaging of supermassive objects at the…
We report on some advances made in the problem of singularities in general relativity. First is introduced the singular semi-Riemannian geometry for metrics which can change their signature (in particular be degenerate). The standard…
Einstein's celebrated theory of gravitation can be presented in three forms: general relativity, teleparallel gravity, and the rarely considered before symmetric teleparallel gravity. Extending the latter, we introduce a new class of…
The generalized second law can be used to prove a singularity theorem, by generalizing the notion of a trapped surface to quantum situations. Like Penrose's original singularity theorem, it implies that spacetime is null geodesically…
The geodesics of a spacetime seldom coincide with those of an embedded submanifold of codimension one. We investigate this issue for higher-dimensional general relativity-like models, firstly in the simpler case without branes to isolate…
We review recent progress in the construction of modified gravity models as alternatives to dark energy as well as the development of cosmological tests of gravity. Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) has been tested accurately…
We argue that the well-known geodesic completeness property of pp-waves, can be disregarded once the geodesics are extracted as being extended along sets of Brinkmann coordinates. This issue is investigated in the more general context of…
We study the issue of length renormalization in the context of fully covariant gravity theories as well as non-relativistic ones such as Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. The difference of their symmetry groups implies a relation between the…
Einstein's General theory of relativity permits spacetime singularities, where null geodesic congruences focus in the presence of matter, which satisfies an appropriate energy condition. In this paper, we provide a minimal defocusing…
In General Relativity, gravity around a black hole is universally regarded as an attractive force. However, quantum effects may significantly alter this classical picture and thus affect the dynamics of test particles. In this work, we…
As we now know, there are indeed at least two major difficulties with General Relativity (GR). The first one is related with its incompatibility with quantum mechanics, in the absence of a widely accepted consistent theory that combines the…
We derive a set of equations describing the linear response of the convergence properties of a geodesic congruence to arbitrary geometry variations. It is a combination of equations describing the deviations from the standard…
We consider f(R,T) modified theory of gravity in which, in general, the gravitational Lagrangian is given by an arbitrary function of the Ricci scalar and the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. We indicate that in this type of the theory,…
We introduce and develop the 1+3 covariant approach to relativity and cosmology to spacetimes of arbitrary dimensions that have nonzero torsion and do not satisfy the metricity condition. Focusing on timelike observers, we identify and…
Gravitational waves (GWs) are independent of any particular theory of gravity. The universality of this notion is highlighted by the Raychaudhuri equation (RE), which is independent of any theory of gravity and contains the Ricci tensor…