Related papers: Swampland Conjectures for an Almost Topological Gr…
Recently, arguments for a refined de Sitter conjecture were put forward in arXiv:1810.05506. Using the large distance conjecture of arXiv:hep-th/0605264, the authors provide evidence for this dS conjecture in asymptotic regimes of field…
Recent progress in AdS/CFT has provided a good understanding of how the bulk spacetime is encoded in the entanglement structure of the boundary CFT. However, little is known about how spacetime emerges directly from the bulk quantum theory.…
Infrared modifications of gravity have been proposed over the years as potentially useful phenomenological models. Massive (multi)-gravity is an interesting class of such theories. The true nature and the ultimate consistency of many of…
We consider warped AdS_3 black holes in generic higher derivatives gravity theories in 2+1 dimensions. The asymptotic symmetry group of the phase space containing these black holes is the semi-direct product of a centrally extended Virasoro…
We determine the most general form of off-shell N=(1,1) supergravity field configurations in three dimensions by requiring that at least one off-shell Killing spinor exists. We then impose the field equations of the topologically massive…
Massless higher-spin fields show no preference for any value of the cosmological constant in $3d$. All matter-free higher-spin gravities in 3d are equivalent to Chern-Simons theories with an appropriate choice of gauge algebra. For various…
I argue that the conventional field theoretic notion of vacuum state is not valid in quantum gravity. The arguments use gravitational effective field theory, as well as results from string theory, particularly the AdS/CFT correspondence.…
Pure 3d gravity in AdS is believed to admit a holographic description in terms of 2d CFT. We introduce a theory of fermionic 3d gravity where we sum over geometries equipped with spin structure, and propose it is holographically described…
Quasi-topological theories of gravity are known to resolve black-hole singularities. We investigate whether the same mechanism can remove cosmological singularities. Focusing on non-polynomial curvature quasi-topological gravities in $d=4$…
We propose a new class of conformal higher spin gravities in three dimensions, which extends the one by Pope and Townsend. The main new feature is that there are infinitely many examples of the new theories with a finite number of higher…
In this work we propose an effective low-energy theory for a large class of 2+1 dimensional non-Abelian topological spin liquids whose edge states are conformal degrees of freedom with central charges corresponding to the coset structure…
The Swampland Program aims to delineate the space of consistent low-energy effective field theories (EFTs) that admit a UV completion in quantum gravity from those that do not. In parallel, holography, and particularly the AdS/CFT…
We study a new class of solutions of three-dimensional topological massive gravity. These solutions can be taken as non-extremal black holes, with their extremal counterparts being discrete quotients of spacelike warped AdS$_3$ along the…
The general second-order massive field equations for arbitrary positive integer spin in three spacetime dimensions, and their "self-dual" limit to first-order equations, are shown to be equivalent to gauge-invariant higher-derivative field…
Noncritical M-theory in 2+1 dimensions has been defined as a double-scaling limit of a nonrelativistic Fermi liquid on a flat two-dimensional plane. Here we study this noncritical M-theory in the limit of high energies, analogous to the…
The idea of the effective topological theory for high-energy scattering proposed by H. and E. Verlinde is applied to the $(2+1)$ dimensional gravity with Einstein action plus Chern-Simons terms. The calculational steps in the topological…
We propose an action to describe high spin topologically massive gravity with a negative cosmological constant. With the frame-like fields and spin connections being combined into two gauge fields, the action includes two gauge field…
An example of a higher spin gravity in four-dimensional flat space has recently been constructed in arXiv:1609.04655 [hep-th]. This theory is chiral and the action is written in the light-cone gauge. The theory has certain stringy features,…
We present an action for minimal massive gravity (MMG) in three dimensions in terms of a dreibein and an independent spin connection. Furthermore, the construction provides an action principle for an infinite family of so-called third-way…
We construct a string theory in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space-time that is independent of the boundary metric. It is a topologically twisted theory of quantum gravity. We study string theories with an asymptotic N=2 superconformal…