Related papers: The Stabilizing Effect of Gravity Made Simple
Quantum mechanics makes the otherwise stable vacua of a theory metastable through the nucleation of bubbles of the new vacuum. This in turn causes a first order phase transition. These cosmological phase transitions may have played an…
We discuss effects of loss of coherence in low energy quantum systems caused by or related to gravitation, referred to as gravitational decoherence. These effects, resulting from random metric fluctuations, for instance, promise to be…
We study a perturbation theory for embedding gravity equations in a background for which corrections to the embedding function are linear with respect to corrections to the flat metric. The arbitrariness remaining after solving the…
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…
We perform canonical quantization of General Relativity, as an effective quantum field theory below the Planck scale, within the BRST-invariant framework. We show that the promotion of constraints to dynamical equations of motion for…
A quantitative test for the validity of the semi-classical approximation in gravity is given. The criterion proposed is that solutions to the semi-classical Einstein equations should be stable to linearized perturbations, in the sense that…
We present stable de Sitter solutions of $\mathcal{N} = 1$ supergravity in a geometric type IIB duality frame with the addition of non-perturbative contributions. Contrary to the standard approach, we retain the moduli dependence of both…
General relativity predicts its own demise at singularities, but also appears to conveniently shield itself from the catastrophic consequences of such singularities, making them safe. For instance, if strong cosmic censorship were…
Consistent coupling of quantum and classical degrees of freedom exists so long as there is both diffusion of the classical degrees of freedom and decoherence of the quantum system. In this paper, we derive the Newtonian limit of such…
We consider quantum effects of a massive antisymmetric tensor field on the dynamics of de Sitter space-time. Our starting point is the most general, stable, linearized Lagrangian arising in nonsymmetric gravitational theories (NGTs), where…
In this paper, we consider two different issues, stability and strong coupling, raised lately in the newly-proposed Horava-Lifshitz (HL) theory of quantum gravity with projectability condition. We find that all the scalar modes are stable…
Building a consistent Quantum Theory of Gravity is one of the most challenging aspects of modern theoretical physics. In the past couple of years, new attempts have been made along the path of ``asymptotic safety'' through the use of Exact…
We consider localization of gravity in domain wall solutions of Einstein's gravity coupled to a scalar field with a generic potential. We discuss conditions on the scalar potential such that domain wall solutions are non-singular. Such…
We provide a general method for studying a manifestly covariant formulation of $p$-form gauge theories on the de Sitter space. This is done by stereographically projecting the corresponding theories, defined on flat Minkowski space, onto…
Canonical methods allow the derivation of effective gravitational actions from the behavior of space-time deformations reflecting general covariance. With quantum effects, the deformations and correspondingly the effective actions change,…
This is an essay sketching the line of thinking which has led the present author to propose the constituent or atomic model of gravitation more than a decade ago. It turns out that viewing the problem of gravitation as a quantum many body…
We give evidence that supersymmetric anti-de Sitter vacua of five-dimensional supergravity cannot be scale separated as a consequence of quantum gravity constraints, such as the weak gravity conjecture or the species scale. We show this in…
We investigate how quantum decoherence influences the tunneling dynamics of quantum fields in cosmological spacetimes. Specifically, we study a scalar field in an asymmetric double-well potential during inflation, coupled to environmental…
In de Sitter ambient space formalism, the linear gravity can be written in terms of a minimally coupled scalar field and a polarization tensor. In this formalism, the massless minimally coupled scalar field can be quantized on Bunch-Davies…
The quantum vacuum fluctuations of a neutral scalar field induced by background zero-range potentials concentrated on a flat hyperplane of co-dimension $1$ in $(d+1)$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime are investigated. Perfectly reflecting…