Related papers: Horndeski in the Swampland
We continue the investigation of F-term axion monodromy inflation in string theory, while seriously taking the issue of moduli stabilization into account. For a number of closed and open string models, we show that they suffer from serious…
We point out that the swampland conjectures, forbidding the presence of global symmetries and (meta-)stable de Sitter vacua within quantum gravity, pick up a dynamical axion for the electroweak SU(2) gauge theory as a natural candidate for…
Horndeski gravity is the most general scalar tensor theory, with a single scalar field, leading to second order field equations and after the GW170817 it has been severely constrained. In this paper, we study the analogue of Horndeski's…
We study a class of homogeneous but anisotropic cosmologies within the family of shift-symmetric Horndeski theories, where the scalar field features an inhomogeneous profile but it preserves a translational symmetry that is realised as a…
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,…
We discuss some of the issues which we encounter when we try to invoke the scalar-tensor theories of gravitation as a theoretical basis of quintessence. One of the advantages of appealing to these theories is that they allow us to implement…
The gravitational positivity bound gives quantitative "swampland'' constraints on low-energy effective theories inside theories of quantum gravity. We give a comprehensive discussion of this bound for those interested in applications to…
The scalar-tensor theories have become popular recently in particular in connection with attempts to explain present accelerated expansion of the universe, but they have been considered as a natural extension of general relativity long time…
We study the cosmology of a string derived supersymmetric flipped $SU(5)$ model in the context of free-fermionic heterotic constructions that allow full calculability of the effective supergravity in perturbation theory around the fermionic…
We study linear perturbations about static and spherically symmetric black holes with a time-independent background scalar field in shift-symmetric Horndeski theories, whose Lagrangian is characterized by coupling functions depending only…
The detection of the GW170817/GRB170817A event improved the constraints on the propagation speed of gravitational waves, thus placing possible variations caused by dark energy under restraint. For models based on scalar fields belonging to…
We analyse the implications of the presence of spatial curvature in modified gravity models. As it is well known, the current standard cosmological model, the $\Lambda$CDM, is assumed to be spatially flat based on the results of many…
The existence and the stability conditions for some exact relativistic solutions of special interest are studied in a higher-order modified teleparallel gravitational theory. The theory with the use of a Lagrange multiplier is equivalent…
Well tempering is one of the few classical field theory methods for solving the original cosmological constant problem, dynamically canceling a large (possibly Planck scale) vacuum energy and leaving the matter component intact, while…
We show that constraints on scalar field potentials and towers of light massive states in asymptotic limits of scalar field space (as posited by the de Sitter Conjecture and the Swampland Distance Conjecture, respectively) are correlated…
We consider higher derivative gravity lagrangians in 3 and 4 dimensions, which admit simple c-theorems, including upto six derivative curvature invariants. Following a suggestion by Myers, these lagrangians are restricted such that the…
We study the cosmological evolution of an induced gravity model with a self-interacting scalar field $\sigma$ and in the presence of matter and radiation. Such model leads to Einstein Gravity plus a cosmological constant as a stable…
In hep-th/0506040 we discussed a classically constrained model of gravity. This theory contains known solutions of General Relativity (GR), and admits solutions that are absent in GR. Here we study cosmological implications of some of these…
There have been many attempts to construct de Sitter space-times in string theory. While arguably there have been some successes, this has proven challenging, leading to the de Sitter swampland conjecture: quantum theories of gravity do not…
Motivated by the swampland dS conjecture, we consider a rolling scalar field as the source of dark energy. Furthermore, the swampland distance conjecture suggests that the rolling field will lead at late times to an exponentially light…