Related papers: Soft singularity and the fundamental length
Five dimensional warped spaces with soft walls are generalizations of the standard Randall-Sundrum compactifications, where instead of an infrared brane one has a curvature singularity (with vanishing warp factor) at finite proper distance…
We discuss a model describing exactly a thin spherically symmetric shell of matter with zero rest mass. We derive the reduced formulation of this system in which the variables are embeddings, their conjugate momenta, and Dirac observables.…
Just like the vector bosons in Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories, gravitons can attain mass by spontaneous local symmetry breaking. The question is whether this can happen in a Lorentz-invariant way. We consider the use of four scalar…
We study quantum gravity in more than four dimensions by means of an exact functional flow. A non-trivial ultraviolet fixed point is found in the Einstein-Hilbert theory. It is shown that our results for the fixed point and universal…
We construct "soft-collinear gravity", the effective field theory which describes the interaction of collinear and soft gravitons with matter (and themselves), to all orders in the soft-collinear power expansion. Despite the absence of…
A new viewpoint for the gauge hierarchy problem is proposed: compactification at a large scale, 1/R, leads to a low energy effective theory with supersymmetry softly broken at a much lower scale, \alpha/R. The hierarchy is induced by an…
In these lectures we report recent work on the exact quantization of dimensionally reduced gravity, i.e. 2d non-linear (G/H)-coset space sigma-models coupled to gravity and a dilaton. Using methods developed in the context of flat space…
Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet gravity is investigated on existence of solutions with mild singularities, not shielded by the event horizons. These still may have sense since presumably such singularities will be smoothed by corrections to…
We show that the dimension of spacetime becomes complex-valued when its short-scale geometry is invariant under a discrete scaling symmetry. This characteristic can generically arise in quantum gravities, for instance, in those based on…
Causal rigid particles whose action includes an {\it arbitrary} dependence on the world-line extrinsic curvature are considered. General classes of solutions are constructed, including {\it causal tachyonic} ones. The Hamiltonian…
As it stands, quantum gravity coupled with matter in three spacetime dimensions is not finite. In this paper I show that an algorithmic procedure that makes it finite exists, under certain conditions. To achieve this result, gravity is…
We determine solutions to 5D Einstein gravity with a discrete fifth dimension. The properties of the solutions depend on the discretization scheme we use and some of them have no continuum counterpart. In particular, we find that the…
It would be extremely useful to know whether a particular low energy effective theory might have come from a compactification of a higher dimensional space. Here, this problem is approached from the ground up by considering theories with…
We examine the singularity resolution issue in quantum gravity by studying a new quantization of standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker geometrodynamics. The quantization procedure is inspired by the loop quantum gravity programme, and is…
New general spherically symmetric solutions have been derived with a cosmological "constant" \Lambda as a source. This \Lambda field is not constant but it satisfies the properties of the asymptotically safe gravity at the ultraviolet fixed…
Non-minimally coupling a scalar field to gravity introduces an additional curvature term into the action which can change the general behavior in strong curvature regimes, in particular close to classical singularities. While one can…
We study gravity in backgrounds that are smooth generalizations of the Randall-Sundrum model, with and without scalar fields. These generalizations include three-branes in higher dimensional spaces which are not necessarily Anti-de Sitter…
We consider quantum gravity with zero cosmological constant in three dimensions. First, we show that pure quantum gravity can be written as a magnetic Carrollian theory living on null infinity, described by Schwarzian-like degrees of…
We revisit the proposal that the resolution of the Cosmological Constant Problem involves a sub-millimeter breakdown of the point-particle approximation for gravitons. No fundamental description of such a breakdown, which simultaneously…
The nature of dark matter is a problem with too many potential solutions. We investigate whether a consistent embedding into quantum gravity can decimate the number of solutions to the dark-matter problem. Concretely, we focus on a hidden…