Related papers: Instabilities in field theories: Lecture notes wit…
The field theory Galilean symmetry, which was introduced in the context of modified gravity, gives a neat way to construct Lorentz-covariant theories of a scalar field, such that the equations of motion contain at most second-order…
Extremely large surveys with future experiments like Euclid and the SKA will soon allow us to access perturbation modes close to the Hubble scale, with wavenumbers $k \sim \mathcal{H}$. If a modified gravity theory is responsible for cosmic…
We consider theories describing the dynamics of a four-dimensional metric, whose Lagrangian is diffeomorphism invariant and depends at most on second derivatives of the metric. Imposing degeneracy conditions we find a set of Lagrangians…
We review the effective field theory of modified gravity in which the Lagrangian involves three dimensional geometric quantities appearing in the 3+1 decomposition of space-time. On the flat isotropic cosmological background we expand a…
In these lectures I review the status of gravity from the point of view of the gauge principle and renormalization, the main tools in the toolbox of theoretical particle physics. In the first lecture I start from the old question "in what…
Many effective field theories describing gravity cannot arise from an underlying theory based on Riemann geometry or its extensions to include torsion and nonmetricity but may instead emerge from another geometry or may have a nongeometric…
This thesis is devoted to the study of gravitational theories which can be seen as modifications or generalisations of General Relativity. The motivation for considering such theories, stemming from Cosmology, High Energy Physics and…
We discuss mimetic gravity theories with direct couplings between the curvature and higher derivatives of the scalar field, up to the quintic order, which were proposed to solve the instability problem for linear perturbations around the…
Modified gravity theory is known to violate Birkhoff's theorem. We explore a key consequence of this violation, the effect of distant matter in the Universe on the motion of test particles. We find that when a particle is accelerated, a…
We discuss spacetime instability for effective field theories of quantum gravity. The effective action of gravity introduces infinite higher derivative curvature terms $R^{2}, { R }_{ \mu \nu }{ R }^{ \mu \nu }, R_{\mu\nu\kappa\lambda}…
An obvious criterion to classify theories of modified gravity is to identify their gravitational degrees of freedom and their coupling to the metric and the matter sector. Using this simple idea, we show that any theory which depends on the…
Typically higher-derivative theories are unstable. Instabilities manifest themselves from extra propagating degrees of freedom, which are unphysical. In this paper, we will investigate an infinite derivative field theory and study its true…
In a nonlinear theory, such as gravity, physically relevant solutions are usually hard to find. Therefore, starting from a background exact solution with symmetries, one uses the perturbation theory, which albeit approximately, provides a…
I discuss the issue of degrees of freedom in modified teleparallel gravity. These theories do have an extra structure on top of the usual (pseudo)Riemannian manifold, that of a flat parallel transport. This structure is absolutely abstract…
We consider the Einstein static and the de Sitter universe solutions and examine their instabilities in a subclass of quadratic modified theories for gravity. This modification proposed by Nash is an attempt to generalize general…
Higher curvature f(R) gravity theories are often plagued with Ostragadsky instability. In this work we show that such instability manifests itself in the corresponding dual scalar tensor theory in the scalar sector Lagrangian. We explicitly…
A review of the new of the problem of dark energy using modified gravity approach is considered. An explanation of the difficulties facing modern cosmology is given and different approaches are presented. We show why some models of gravity…
Deformations of maximal supergravity theories induced by gauging non-abelian subgroups of the duality group reveal the presence of charged M-theory degrees of freedom that are not necessarily contained in supergravity. The relation with…
"Physical theories of fundamental significance tend to be gauge theories. These are theories in which the physical system being dealt with is described by more variables than there are physically independent degree of freedom. The…
A class of theories of gravity based on a Lagrangian which depends on the curvature and metric - but not on the derivatives of the curvature tensor - is of interest in several contexts including in the development of the paradigm that…