Related papers: Dimensionless physics
Conventional quantization of two-dimensional diffeomorphism and Weyl invariant theories sacrifices the latter symmetry to anomalies, while maintaining the former. When alternatively Weyl invariance is preserved by abandoning diffeomorphism…
Current physics is faced with the fundamental problem of unifying quantum theory and general relativity, which would have resulted in quantum gravity. The main effort to construct the latter has been bent on quantizing spacetime structure,…
A natural geometric framework of noncommutative spacetime is symplectic geometry rather than Riemannian geometry. The Darboux theorem in symplectic geometry then admits a novel form of the equivalence principle such that the…
Emergent modified gravity presents a new set of generally covariant gravitational theories in which the space-time metric is not directly given by one of the fundamental fields. A metric compatible with the modified dynamics of gravity is…
The standard picture of viable higher-dimensional theories is that extra dimensions manifest themselves at short distances only, their effects being negligible at scales larger than some critical value. We show that this is not necessarily…
We give an alternative description of the physical content of general relativity that does not require a Lorentz invariant spacetime. Instead, we find that gravity admits a dual description in terms of a theory where local size is…
Why does {\bf F} equal m{\bf a} in Newton's equation of motion? How does a gravitational field produce a force? Why are inertial mass and gravitational mass the same? It appears that all three of these seemingly axiomatic foundational…
Self-dual gravity is a diffeomorphism invariant theory in four dimensions that describes two propagating polarisations of the graviton and has a negative mass dimension coupling constant. Nevertheless, this theory is not only renormalisable…
The generalised-geometric formulation of 10-dimensional supergravity suggests a particular simple "limit", which results in a theory whose only dynamical degrees of freedom are the dilaton and the dilatino. The theory is still invariant…
When four-dimensional general relativity is embedded in an unconstrained man-ner in a fifth dimension, the physical quantities of spacetime can be interpreted as geometrical properties related to the extra dimension. It has become…
Quantum fluctuations of the vacuum stress-energy tensor are highly non-Gaussian, and can have unexpectedly large effects on spacetime geometry. In this paper, we study a two-dimensional dilaton gravity model coupled to a conformal field, in…
We review quantum gravity model building using the new formalism of `quantum Riemannian geometry' to construct this on finite discrete spaces and on fuzzy ones such as matrix algebras. The formalism starts with a `differential structure' as…
Special theory of relativity has been formulated in a vacuum momentum-energy representation which is equivalent to Einstein special relativity and predicts just the same results as it. Although in this sense such a formulation would be at…
Gravity stands out among the fundamental interactions because of its apparent incompatibility with having a quantum description. Moreover, thermodynamic aspects of gravitation theory appears as puzzling features of some classical solutions…
Conceptual difficulties in semiclassical and quantum gravity arise from diffeomorphism invariance of classical general relativity. With a motivation to shed some light on these difficulties, we study a class of toy models for which…
We consider some flat space theories for spin 2 gravitons, with less invariance than full diffeomorphisms. For the massless case, classical stability and absence of ghosts require invariance under transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff). Generic…
We consider the theory of a symmetric tensor field in 4D, invariant under a subclass of infinitesimal diffeomorphism transformations, where the vector diff parameter is the 4-divergence of a scalar parameter. The resulting gauge symmetry…
We apply the background field method and the effective action formalism to describe the four-dimensional dynamical Casimir effect. Our picture corresponds to the consideration of quantum cosmology for an expanding FRW universe (the boundary…
Symmetries and transformations are explored in the framework of entropic quantum dynamics. Two conditions arise that are required for any transformation to qualify as a symmetry. The heart of this work lies in the application of these…
A possible way out of the conundrum of quantum gravity is the proposal that general relativity (GR) is not a fundamental theory but emerges from an underlying microscopic description. Despite recent interest in the emergent gravity program…