Related papers: $Q$-curvature and gravity
General relativity and its cosmological solution predicts the existence of tensor modes of perturbations evolving on top of our Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker expanding Universe. Being gauge invariant and not necessarily coupled to…
Quantum theory of dilaton gravity is studied in $2+\epsilon$ dimensions. Divergences are computed and renormalized at one-loop order. The mixing between the Liouville field and the dilaton field eliminates $1/\epsilon$ singularity in the…
Conformal symmetry is investigated within the context of axion-dilaton-modulus theory of gravity of Brans-Dicke-type. A distinction is made between general conformal symmetry and invariance under transformations of the physical units. The…
The theory described by the sum of the Einstein-Hilbert action and the action of conformal scalar field possesses the duality symmetry which includes some special conformal transformation of the metric, and also inversion of scalar field…
We study quantum gravity in $2+\epsilon$ dimensions in such a way to preserve the volume preserving diffeomorphism invariance. In such a formulation, we prove the following trinity: the general covariance, the conformal invariance and the…
We study the problem of how to derive conformal symmetry in the framework of quantum gravity. We start with a generic gravitational theory which is invariant under both the general coordinate transformation (GCT) and Weyl transformation (or…
This dissertation investigates three main topics, all of which dealing with alternative, higher-order gravity theories in four dimensions. Firstly, we study the variational and conformal structure of those theories. Next, we analyse their…
Conformal theories in a d dimensional spacetime may be expressed as manifestly conformal theories in a d+2 dimensional conformal space as first proposed by Dirac. The reduction to d dimensions goes via the d+1 dimensional hypercone in the…
The question of general covariance in quantum gravity is considered in the first post-Newtonian approximation. Transformation properties of observable quantities under deformations of a reference frame, induced by variations of the gauge…
Random tensors are the natural generalization of random matrices to higher order objects. They provide generating functions for random geometries and, assuming some familiarity with random matrix theory and quantum field theory, we discuss…
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…
We study the Carrollian limit of the (general) quadratic gravity in four dimensions. We find that in order for the Carrollian theory to be a modification of the Carrollian limit of general relativity, the parameters in the action must…
We study gravity coupled to scalar and fermion fields in the Einstein-Cartan framework. We discuss the most general form of the action that contains terms of mass dimension not bigger than four, leaving out only contributions quadratic in…
We study the non-relativistic Newton-Cartan limit of higher-order gravity theories in arbitrary dimensions. We first study it at the level of the action by introducing an additional 1-form gauge field and coupling it appropriately to the…
We investigate the dynamics of a family of functional extensions of the (Eddington-inspired) Born-Infeld gravity theory, constructed with the inverse of the metric and the Ricci tensor. We provide a generic formal solution for the…
It is argued that quantum gravity has an interpretation as a topological field theory provided a certain constraint from the path intergral measure is respected. The constraint forces us to couple gauge and matter fields to gravity for…
We study a class of Lorentz violating quantum field theories that contain higher space derivatives, but no higher time derivatives, and become renormalizable in the large N expansion. The fixed points of their renormalization-group flows…
A low-energy perturbation theory is developed from the nonperturbative framework of covariant Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) by employing the background field method. The resulting perturbation theory is a 2-parameter expansion in the…
We argue for enlarging the traditional view of quantum gravity, based on "quantizing GR", to include explicitly the non-spatiotemporal nature of the fundamental building blocks suggested by several modern quantum gravity approaches (and…
We investigate two-dimensional higher derivative gravitational theories in a Riemann-Cartan framework and obtain the most general static black hole solutions in conformal coordinates. We also consider the hamiltonian formulation of the…