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We discuss two scenarios of emergent gravity. In one of them the quantum vacuum is considered as superplastic crystal, and the effective gravity describes the dynamical elastic deformations of this crystal. In the other one the…
When the semi-positive cosmological constant is dynamical, the naive Euclidean Einstein action is unbounded from below and the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe is not normalizable. With the inclusion of back-reaction (a crucial…
When describing gravity at high energies it is natural to introduce terms quadratic in the curvature as first corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert action. Static, spherically symmetric classical solutions are studied in the case of the…
In light of recent progress in ghost-free theories of massive gravity and multi-gravity, we reconsider the problem of constructing a ghost-free theory of an interacting spin-2 field charged under a U(1) gauge symmetry. Our starting point is…
We consider conformal and scale-invariant gravities in d dimensions, with a special focus on pure $R^2$ gravity in the scale-invariant case. In four dimensions, the structure of these theories is well known. However, in dimensions larger…
2D $R^2$ quantum gravity in infinitely large invariant volume is considered. In weak coupling limit the dynamics is reduced to quantum mechanics of a single degree of freedom. The correspondent two - point Green function is calculated…
Three dimensional Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant -1/\ell^2 deformed by a gravitational Chern-Simons action with coefficient 1/\mu is studied in an asymptotically AdS_3 spacetime. It is argued to violate unitary or…
Motivated by the apparent dependence of string $\sigma$--models on the sum of spacetime metric and antisymmetric tensor fields, we reconsider gravity theories constructed from a nonsymmetric metric. We first show that all such "geometrical"…
We study a set of static solutions of the Einstein equations in presence of a massless scalar field and establish their connection to the Kantowski-Sachs cosmological solutions based on some kind of duality transformations. The physical…
We study the formulation of massless higher-spin gravity on AdS$_3$ in a gauge in which the fundamental variables satisfy free field Poisson brackets. This gauge choice leaves a small portion of the gauge freedom unfixed, which should be…
In gravitational Higgs mechanism graviton components acquire mass via spontaneous diffeomorphism breaking by scalar vacuum expectation values. We point out that in the massless limit the resulting theory is not Einstein-Hilbert gravity…
In this paper, we study Einstein gravity extended with Ricci polynomials and derive the constraints on the coupling constants from the considerations of being ghost free, exhibiting an $a$-theorem and maintaining causality. The salient…
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…
Equations for cosmological evolution are formulated in a Weyl invariant formalism to take into account possible Weyl anomalies. Near two dimensions, the renormalized cosmological term leads to a nonlocal energy-momentum tensor and a slowly…
We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them…
We study the expectation value of a nonplanar Wilson graph operator in SL(2,C) Chern-Simons theory on $S^3$. In particular we analyze its asymptotic behaviour in the double-scaling limit in which both the representation labels and the…
We perform a thorough study of the theoretical consistency of recently proposed, viable, quadratic modifications of gravity that are functions of the the Gauss-Bonnet invariant, regarding the stability of their perturbations around vacuum,…
The existence of a ghost free theory of massive gravity begs for an interpretation as a Higgs phase of General Relativity. We revisit the study of massive gravity as a Higgs phase. Absent a compelling microphysical model of spontaneous…
We show that starting with a cosmological constant in a curved space-time, the Einstein-Hilbert term of general relativity is generated through a ghost condensation. We fix Weyl symmetry, or equivalently local scale symmetry by a gauge…
We consider the most general action for gravity which is quadratic in curvature. In this case first order and second order formalisms are not equivalent. This framework is a good candidate for a unitary and renormalizable theory of the…