Related papers: The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
From calculations of the variance of fluctuations and of the mean of the energy density of a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum as a function of an intrinsic scale defined by the world function between two nearby points (as used…
We consider phase transitions and their contributions to vacuum energy in the manifestly local theory of vacuum energy sequestering. We demonstrate that the absence of instabilities imposes constraints on the couplings of gravitating and…
We describe a simple gauge-fixing that leads to a construction of a quantum Hilbert space for quantum gravity in an asymptotically Anti de Sitter spacetime, valid to all orders of perturbation theory. The construction is motivated by a…
Gravitational collapse into a black hole has been extensively studied with classical sources. We develop a new formalism to simulate quantum fields forming a black hole. This formalism utilizes well-established techniques used for classical…
This paper reexamines the question of vacuum decay in theories of quantum gravity. In particular it suggests that decay into stable flat or AdS vacua, never occurs. Instead, vacuum decay occurs, if at all, into a cosmological spacetime. If…
We remark that the weak coupling regime of the stochastic stabilization of 2D quantum gravity has a unique perturbative vacuum, which does not support instanton configurations. By means of Monte Carlo simulations we show that the…
Pseudo-Newtonian gravitational potential describing the gravitational field of static and spherically symmetric black holes in the universe with a repulsive cosmological constant is introduced. In order to demonstrate the accuracy of the…
We analyze the effect induced on standard quantum field theory (in functional approach) by quantum gravity corrections to a pure classical background. In the framework of the Kucha\v{r} and Torre proposal for a gravity-matter theory…
Whether the Standard Model electroweak vacuum is stable, metastable or unstable depends crucially on the top mass (and, to a lesser extent, on other measurable quantities). These topics are reviewed and updated by taking into account the…
The false vacua of some potentials do not decay via Euclidean bounces. This typically happens for tunneling actions with a flat direction (in field configuration space) that is lifted by a perturbation into a sloping valley, pushing the…
We perform a thorough study of the theoretical consistency of recently proposed, viable, quadratic modifications of gravity that are functions of the the Gauss-Bonnet invariant, regarding the stability of their perturbations around vacuum,…
The availability of scaling solutions in renormalisation group improved versions of cosmology are investigated in the high-energy limit. We adopt $f(R)$-type models of quantum gravity which display an interacting ultraviolet fixed point at…
We consider a linearized, effective quantum theory of gravitation in which gravity weakens at energies higher than ~10^-3 eV in order to accommodate the apparent smallness of the cosmological constant. Such a theory predicts departures from…
It is shown how metastable de Sitter vacua might arise from heterotic M-theory. The balancing of its two non-perturbative effects, open membrane instantons against gaugino condensation on the hidden boundary, which act with opposing forces…
We consider the standard Einstein-Hilbert-Higgs action where the Higgs field couples nonminimally with gravity via the term $\xi h^2 \mathcal{R}$, and investigate the stability of the electroweak vacuum in the presence of gravitational…
In this paper, we give a systematic procedure for building locally stable dS vacua in $\mathcal{N}=1$ supergravity models motivated by string theory. We assume that one of the superfields has a Kahler potential of no-scale type and impose a…
We outline, test, and apply a new scheme for nonpertubative analyses of quantized field systems in contact with dynamical gravity. While gravity is treated classically in the present paper, the approach lends itself for a generalization to…
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…
We analyze the weak-field limit of General Relativity with matter and its possible quantisations. This analysis aims towards a predictive quantum theory to provide a first-principles description of gravitational effects in macroscopic…