Related papers: Gravitational Observatories
We study a rotating and expanding, Godel type metric, originally considered by Korotkii and Obukhov, showing that, in the limit of large times and nearby distances, it reduces to the open metric of Friedmann. In the epochs when radiation or…
Non-linear special relativity (or doubly special relativity) is a simple framework for encoding properties of flat quantum space-time. In this paper we show how this formalism may be generalized to incorporate curvature (leading to what…
The dS/CFT correspondence postulates the existence of a Euclidean CFT dual to a suitable gravity theory with Dirichlet boundary conditions asymptotic to de Sitter spacetime. A semi-classical model of such a correspondence consists of…
By referring to theorems of Donaldson and Hitchin, we exhibit a rigorous AdS/CFT-type correspondence between classical 2+1 dimensional vacuum general relativity theory on S x R and SO(3) Hitchin theory (regarded as a classical conformal…
We exploit an arbitrary extrinsic time foliation of spacetime to solve the constraints in spherically symmetric general relativity. Among such foliations there is a one parameter family, linear and homogeneous in the extrinsic curvature,…
We consider a little known aspect of signature change, where the overall sign of the metric is allowed to change, with physical implications. We show how, in different formulations of general relativity, this type of classical signature…
The general class of Robinson-Trautman metrics that describe gravitational radiation in the exterior of bounded sources in four space-time dimensions is shown to admit zero curvature formulation in terms of appropriately chosen…
We report a holographic study of a two-dimensional dilaton gravity theory with the Dirichlet boundary condition for the cases of non-vanishing and vanishing cosmological constants. Our result shows that the boundary theory of the…
Spacetime singularities represent a fundamental challenge in gravitational physics. We present a mathematically consistent framework for signature-changing black holes based on the $(2+1)$-dimensional BTZ metric, where the signature…
While Einstein's theory of gravity is formulated in a smooth setting, the celebrated singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose describe many physical situations in which this smoothness must eventually break down. In positive-definite…
We review what is known about boundary conditions in General Relativity on a spacetime of Euclidean signature. The obvious Dirichlet boundary condition, in which one specifies the boundary geometry, is actually not elliptic and in general…
We construct a model of quantum gravity in which dimension, topology and geometry of spacetime are dynamical. The microscopic degree of freedom is a real rectangular matrix whose rows label internal flavours, and columns label spatial…
We explore a classical instability of spacetimes of dimension $D>4$. Firstly, we consider static solutions: generalised black holes and brane world metrics. The dangerous mode is a tensor mode on an Einstein base manifold of dimension…
This thesis explores the thermodynamics of the cosmological horizon, aiming to make progress towards a better understanding of the microscopic nature of its entropy. We utilise the constrained nature of low-dimensional gravity to do so and…
We develop a model of spatially flat, homogeneous and isotropic cosmology in Lorentzian Regge calculus, employing 4-dimensional Lorentzian frusta as building blocks. By examining the causal structure of the discrete spacetimes obtained by…
We showed that the principle of nongravitating vacuum energy, when formulated in the first order formalism, solves the cosmological constant problem. The most appealing formulation of the theory displays a local symmetry associated with the…
A consistent approach to the description of integral coordinate invariant functionals of the metric on manifolds ${\cal M}_{\alpha}$ with conical defects (or singularities) of the topology $C_{\alpha}\times\Sigma$ is developed. According to…
In recent years, a growing momentum has been gained by the emergent gravity framework. Within the latter, the very concepts of geometry and gravitational interaction are not seen as elementary aspects of Nature but rather as collective…
We establish the linear instability of the semiclassical Einstein-Klein-Gordon system linearised about the Minkowski vacuum spacetime. The proof relies on formulating a forcing problem for both metric and state perturbations within the…
Inspired by previous work in 2+1 dimensional quantum gravity, which found evidence for a discretization of time in the quantum theory, we reexamine the issue for the case of pure Lorentzian gravity with vanishing cosmological constant and…