Related papers: Six Dimensional Topological Gravity and the Cosmol…
This dissertation investigates three main topics, all of which dealing with alternative, higher-order gravity theories in four dimensions. Firstly, we study the variational and conformal structure of those theories. Next, we analyse their…
We discuss the hypothesis of a fixed point for quantum gravity coupled to a scalar, in the limit where the scalar field goes to infinity, accompanied by a suitable scaling of the metric. We propose that no scalar potential is present for…
The physics of quantum gravity is discussed within the framework of topological quantum field theory. Some of the principles are illustrated with examples taken from theories in which space-time is three dimensional.
Four-dimensional Einstein's General Relativity is shown to arise from a gauge theory for the conformal group, SO(4,2). The theory is constructed from a topological dimensional reduction of the six-dimensional Euler density integrated over a…
A key challenge for many quantum gravity approaches is to construct states that describe smooth geometries on large scales. Here we define a family of $(2+1)$-dimensional quantum gravity states which arise from curvature excitations…
Quasi-topological terms in gravity can be viewed as those that give no contribution to the equations of motion for a special subclass of metric ans\"atze. They therefore play no r\^ole in constructing these solutions, but can affect the…
We simulate 4d simplicial gravity for three topologis S4, S3xS1, (S1)^4 and show that the free energy for these three fixed topology ensembles is the same in the thermodynamic limit. We show, that the next-to-leading order corrections, at…
The author has previously suggested that the ground state for 4-dimensional quantum gravity can be represented as a condensation of non-linear gravitons connected by Dirac strings. In this note we suggest that the low-lying excitations of…
We formulate gauge theories on noncompact Lorentzian manifolds. For definiteness we choose an SO(1,4) gauge theory -- the isometry group of the five dimensional Minkowski space. We make use of the natural inner product to construct the…
We show that Poincare-invariant topological gravity in even dimensions can be formulated as a transgression field theory in one higher dimension whose gauge connections are associated to linear and nonlinear realizations of the Poincare…
The maximal SO(5) gauged D=7 supergravity is dimensionally reduced to six dimensions yielding a new SO(5) gauged D=6 model. It is shown that, unlike in D=7, the SO(5) gauge coupling constant can be taken to zero to yield the maximally…
We consider compactifications induced by the gravitino field of eleven dimensional supergravity. Such compactifications are not trivial in the sense that the gravitino profiles are not related to pure bosonic ones by means of a…
Bryant and Salamon gave a construction of metrics of G2 holonomy on the total space of the bundle of anti-self-dual (ASD) 2-forms over a 4-dimensional self-dual Einstein manifold. We generalise it by considering the total space of an SO(3)…
We investigate vacuum static black hole solutions of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity with a negative cosmological constant in five dimensions. These are solutions with horizons of nontrivial topologies. The first one possesses a horizon with…
We use astrophysical data to shed light on fundamental physics by constraining parametrized theoretical cosmological and gravitational models. Gravitational parameters are those constants that parametrize possible departures from Einstein's…
Recently, there have been claims in the literature that the cosmological constant problem can be dynamically solved by specific compactifications of gravity from higher-dimensional toy models. These models have the novel feature that in the…
We consider the quantization of space-times which can possess different topologies within a symmetry reduced version of Wheeler-DeWitt theory. The quantum states are defined from a natural decomposition as an outer-product of a topological…
We reconsider a gauge theory of gravity in which the gauge group is the conformal group SO(4,2) and the action is of the Yang-Mills form, quadratic in the curvature. The resulting gravitational theory exhibits local conformal symmetry and…
Any canonical quantum theory can be understood to arise from the compatibility of the statistical geometry of distinguishable observations with the canonical Poisson structure of Hamiltonian dynamics. This geometric perspective offers a…
Within the context of top-down holography, we study a one-parameter family of regular background solutions of maximal gauged supergravity in seven dimensions, dimensionally reduced on a 2-torus. The dual, four-dimensional confining field…