Related papers: The cosmological constant as a boundary term
We study the Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a spatially flat Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe with pressureless dust (modeled via the Brown-Kucha\v{r} formalism) and a dynamical cosmological constant $\Lambda$ treated…
The central equation of quantum gravity is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We give an argument suggesting that exact solutions of this equation give a surface in the space of coupling constants. This provides a mechanism for determining the…
We discuss cosmology based on a Cuscuta-Galileon gravity theory, which preserves just two degrees of freedom. Although there exists no additional degrees of freedom, introduction of a potential of a scalar field changes the dynamics. The…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
We argue that the instability of Euclidean Einstein gravity is an indication that the vacuum is non perturbative and contains a condensate of the metric tensor in a manner reminiscent of Yang-Mills theories. As a simple step toward the…
Einstein-Hilbert action is supplemented by Gauss-Bonnet squared term, its phase-space structure is constructed and canonical quantization is performed. Resolution of a contradiction that emerges in the process, requires the presence of…
Unimodular gravity (UG) is considered, under many aspects, equivalent to General Relativity (GR), even if the theory is invariant under a more restricted diffeomorphic class of transformations. We discuss the conditions for the equivalence…
The Hamiltonian formalism of the generalized unimodular gravity theory, which was recently suggested as a model of dark energy, is shown to be a complicated example of constrained dynamical system. The set of its canonical constraints has a…
Recently a phenomenological relationship for the observed cosmological constant has been discussed by Motl and Carroll in the context of treating the cosmological constant as a $2\times 2$ matrix but no specific realization of the idea was…
The existence of a small, non-zero cosmological constant is one of the major puzzles in fundamental physics. Naively, quantum field theory arguments would imply a cosmological constant which is up to 10$^{120}$ times larger than the…
The standard model of elementary particle physics and the theory of general relativity can be extended by the introduction of a vacuum variable which is responsible for the near vanishing of the present cosmological constant (vacuum energy…
We consider a modified gravity model which we call "dynamical Henneaux-Teitelboim gravity" because of its close relationship with the Henneaux-Teitelboim formulation of unimodular gravity. The latter is a fully diffeomorphism-invariant…
In this paper, we discuss the gravitational waves in the context of gauge theory gravity with a negative cosmological constant. The gauge theory gravity is a gravity theory under gauge formulation in the language of geometric algebra. In…
We here consider a generalization of the Klein-Gordon scalar wave equation which involves a single arbitrary function. The quantization may be viewed as allowing $\hbar$ to be a function of the momentum or wave vector rather than a…
We use the quantum unimodular theory of gravity to relate the value of the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, and the energy scale for the emergence of cosmological classicality. The fact that $\Lambda$ and unimodular time are complementary…
We consider a Weyl-invariant formulation of gravity with a cosmological constant in d-dimensional spacetime and show that near two dimensions the classical action reduces to the timelike Liouville action. We show that the renormalized…
We consider quantization of the positive curvature Friedmann cosmology in the unimodular modification of Einstein's theory, in which the spacetime four-volume appears as an explicit time variable. The Hamiltonian admits self-adjoint…
We derive the effects of a non-zero cosmological constant $\Lambda$ on gravitational wave propagation in the linearized approximation of general relativity. In this approximation we consider the situation where the metric can be written as…
We present the canonical analysis of different versions of unimodular gravity defined in the Pleba\'nski formalism, based on a (generally complex) SO(3) spin connection and set of (self-dual) two-forms. As in the metric formulation of…
We study the quantum dynamics of de Sitter space formulated as a minisuperspace model with flat spatial hypersurfaces in unimodular gravity, both in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach and in loop quantum cosmology (LQC). Time evolution is defined…