Related papers: The Smeared Null Energy Condition
Modeling of matter bounce in $f(R,T)$ gravity has been presented with no violation of the null energy condition. Only a closed universe with negative pressure is allowed in good agreement with some recent observations which favor a universe…
There are known models of spherical gravitational collapse in which the collapse ends in a naked shell-focusing singularity for some initial data. If a massless scalar field is quantized on the classical background provided by such a star,…
In the semiclassical quantum gravity derived from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the energy density of a matter field loses quantum coherence due to the induced gauge potential from the parametric interaction with gravity in a non-static…
We define the notion of energy, and compute its values, for gravitational systems involving terms quadratic in curvature. While our construction parallels that of ordinary Einstein gravity, there are significant differences both…
Vacuum energy in quantum field theory, being the sum of zero-point energies of all field modes, is formally infinite but yet, after regularization or renormalization, can give rise to finite observable effects. One way of understanding how…
Positivity bounds on scattering amplitudes provide a necessary condition for a low-energy effective field theory to have a consistent ultraviolet completion. Their extension to gravity theories has been studied in the past years aiming at…
Quantum fields do not satisfy the pointwise energy conditions that are assumed in the original singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking. Accordingly, semiclassical quantum gravity lies outside their scope. Although a number of…
It is suggested that the vacuum expectation of the quantum vacuum energy-momentum is zero, but quantum fluctuations give rise to a space-time curvature equivalent to that of a cosmological constant or dark energy. Calculations within…
Standard approaches to quantum gravity start with a pre-spacetime structure and attempt, in accordance with Bohr's correspondence principle, to recover the pseudo-Riemannian manifold in the low energy limit. These approaches assume there is…
We apply positivity bounds directly to a $U(1)$ gauge theory with charged scalars and charged fermions, i.e. QED, minimally coupled to gravity. Assuming that the massless $t$-channel pole may be discarded, we show that the improved…
The problem of cosmological constant and vacuum energy is usually thought of as the subject of general relativity. However, the vacuum energy is important for the Universe even in the absence of gravity, i.e. in the case when the Newton…
Fewster and Mistry have given an explicit, non-optimal quantum weak energy inequality that constrains the smeared energy density of Dirac fields in Minkowski spacetime. Here, their argument is adapted to the case of flat, two-dimensional…
We study singular, supersymmetric domain-wall solutions supported by the massive breathing mode scalars of, for example, sphere reductions in M-theory or string theory. The space-time on one side of such a wall is asymptotic to the Cauchy…
Hawking's singularity theorem concerns matter obeying the strong energy condition (SEC), which means that all observers experience a non-negative effective energy density (EED). The SEC ensures the timelike convergence property. However,…
It has been widely believed that, except in very extreme situations, the influence of gravity on quantum fields should amount to just small, sub-dominant contributions. This view seemed to be endorsed by the seminal results obtained over…
We obtain the matter-graviton scattering amplitude in the gravitational theory of quadratic curvature, which has $R_{\mu\nu}^2$ term in the action. Unitarity bound is not satisfied because of the existence of negative norm states, while an…
It is generally known that the energy density can be negative in quantum field theory. It is also believed that there are limits on this negative energy density. These limits are known as the quantum inequalities. In a recent paper [8] an…
The quantum null energy condition (QNEC) is a conjectured relation between a null version of quantum field theory energy and derivatives of quantum field theory von Neumann entropy. In some cases, divergences cancel between these two terms…
We review well known classical energy conditions and their implications for gravitational solutions, including the celebrated Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems. We then consider quantum fields coupled to gravity, where the topic…
Considerable interest has recently been expressed regarding the issue of whether or not quantum field theory on a fixed but curved background spacetime satisfies the averaged null energy condition (ANEC). A comment by Wald and Yurtsever…