Related papers: Gravity, Superselection Rules and Axions
Recently it has been pointed out that the characteristic quantum-gravity scale could be as low as the weak scale in theories with gravity propagating in higher dimensions. The observed smallness of Newton's constant is a consequence of the…
The physical origin of the strong CP problem in QCD, rooted in the structures of the vacuum of the standard model, is reviewed. The chiral solution to this problem, with its accompanying axion, is explained and various characteristics of…
This paper studies the role of the axial gauge in the semiclassical analysis of simple supergravity about the Euclidean four-ball, when non-local boundary conditions of the spectral type are imposed on gravitino perturbations at the…
One of the obstacles to reconciling quantum theory with general relativity, is constructing a theory which is both consistent with observation, and and gives finite answers at high energy, so that the theory holds at arbitrarily short…
The vacuum of quantum chromodynamics has an incredibly rich structure at the nonperturbative level, which is intimately connected with the topology of gauge fields, and put to a test by the strong CP problem. We investigate the…
We study the thermodynamics of Einstein gravity with vanishing cosmological constant subjected to conformal boundary conditions. Our focus is on comparing the series of subextensive terms to predictions from thermal effective field theory,…
The scale dependent effective average action for quantum gravity complies with the fundamental principle of Background Independence. Ultimately the background metric it formally depends on is selected self-consistently by means of a…
We explore the possibility that supersymmetry breaking is mediated to the Standard Model sector through the interactions of a generalized axion multiplet that gains a F-term expectation value. Using an effective field theory framework we…
In this work we derive general quantum phenomenological equations of gravitational dynamics and analyse its features. The derivation uses the formalism developed in thermodynamics of spacetime and introduces low energy quantum gravity…
As a cutoff scale of quantum gravity, the species scale can be defined by the scale at which the perturbativity of the non-renormalizable gravitational interaction begins to break down. Since it is determined by the number of species in the…
Several approaches to quantum gravity lead to nonlocal modifications of fields' dynamics. This, in turn, can give rise to nonlocal modifications of quantum mechanics at non-relativistic energies. Here, we analyze the nonlocal…
We review our recent work on quantum foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity (formulated as metastring theory) and various implications for the problems of dark matter and dark energy. The first point…
We derive an effective gravitational potential, induced by the quantum wavefunction of a physical vacuum of a self-gravitating configuration, while the vacuum itself is viewed as the superfluid described by the logarithmic quantum wave…
We discuss three dimensional compact QED with a theta term due to an axionic field. The variational gauge invariant functional is considered and it is shown that the ground state energy is independent of theta in a leading approximation.…
We argue that sufficiently complex grand unified theories involving extra strong intractions that confine at very short distances, may lead to a heavy axion solution of the CP problem of QCD. This axion may have a mass within accessible…
Despite the fact that quantum gravity is non-renormalisable, a consistent and mathematically rigorous construction of a perturbation series is possible. This is based on the use of the Batalin-Vilkovisky-Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin formalism…
Semiclassical gravity, in which a classical spacetime is sourced by the quantum expectation value of the stress-energy tensor, is a standard framework for describing the gravitational interaction of quantum matter. In the nonrelativistic…
Quantum gravity is studied nonperturbatively in the case in which space has a boundary with finite area. A natural set of boundary conditions is studied in the Euclidean signature theory, in which the pullback of the curvature to the…
The problem of finding the quantum theory of the gravitational field, and thus understanding what is quantum spacetime, is still open. One of the most active of the current approaches is loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum gravity is a…
In the recent times a lot of effort has been devoted to improve our knowledge about the space of string theory vacua (``the landscape'') to find statistical grounds to justify how and why the theory selects its vacuum. Particularly…