Related papers: A note on diffeomorphism-invariance in gravitation…
Trace-free Einstein gravity is a theory of gravity that is an alternative to general relativity, wherein the cosmological constant arises as an integration constant. However, there are no fully diffeomorphism-invariant action principles…
Unimodular gravity is an interesting approach to address the cosmological constant problem, since the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate in this framework, and the cosmological constant appears as an integration…
A thorough study and analysis on the conceptual foundations of unimodular gravity shows that this theory is essentially general relativity disguised as unimodular relativity in the literature. The main reason for this dilemma is accepting…
A theory of gravity alternative to general relativity is trace-free Einstein gravity, which has the remarkable property that the cosmological constant emerges as an integration constant. In this paper, we report two fully…
We investigate path integral quantization of two versions of unimodular gravity. First a fully diffeomorphism-invariant theory is analyzed, which does not include a unimodular condition on the metric, while still being equivalent to other…
Trace-free Einstein gravity is a prominent alternative to general relativity, which has two versions: one in which the energy-momentum conservation is assumed a priori and another in which it is not. In the first version, the cosmological…
The trace-free version of the Einstein Gravitational equations, essentially equivalent to unimodular gravity, can solve the troubling issue of the huge discrepancy between quantum field theory estimates of the vacuum energy density and the…
It is well known that the Einstein-Hilbert action in two dimensions is topological and yields an identically vanishing Einstein tensor. Consequently one is faced with difficulties when formulating a non-trivial gravity model. We present a…
In contrast to electrodynamics, Einstein's gravitation equations are not invariant with respect to a wide class of the mapping of field variables which leave equations of motion of test particles in a given coordinate system invariant. It…
In the present paper, we revisit gravitational theories which are invariant under TDiffs -- transverse (volume preserving) diffeomorphisms and global scale transformations. It is known that these theories can be rewritten in an equivalent…
Our conventional system of physical units is based on local or microscopic {\it dimensional} quantities which are {\it defined}, for convenience or otherwise aesthetic reasons, to be spacetime-independent. A more general choice of units may…
We study a noncommutative deformation of general relativity where the gravitational field is described by a matrix-valued symmetric two-tensor field. The equations of motion are derived in the framework of this new theory by varying a…
This contribution investigates modifications of General Relativity that allow or mimic energy nonconservation. We focus on Unimodular Gravity (UG), a theory that explicitly breaks diffeomorphism invariance, and show that it can lead to…
It is generally believed that a full-fledged theory of quantum gravity should exhibit background independence and diffeomorphism invariance. In its most general form, the latter comprises field redefinitions, which are diffeomorphisms in…
We consider two concepts often discussed as significant features of general relativity (particularly when contrasted with the other forces of the Standard Model): background independence and diffeomorphism invariance. We remind the reader…
For a field theory that is invariant under diffeomorphisms there is a subtle interplay between symmetries, conservation laws and the phase space of the theory. The natural language for describing these ideas is that of differential forms…
A deformation of the algebra of diffeomorphisms is constructed for canonically deformed spaces with constant deformation parameter theta. The algebraic relations remain the same, whereas the comultiplication rule (Leibniz rule) is different…
It is well-known that the trace-free Einstein tensor of a pseudo-Riemannian metric cannot arise by variation of a local diffeomorphism-invariant action functional with the (inverse) metric as field variable. We show that this statement…
While Einstein was guided by the principle of general covariance in formulating general relativity, Kretschmann later argued that this principle lacks physical significance, since any space-time theory can be reformulated in a generally…
This is an introduction to an algebraic construction of a gravity theory on noncommutative spaces which is based on a deformed algebra of (infinitesimal) diffeomorphisms. We start with some fundamental ideas and concepts of noncommutative…