Related papers: Ghost Equations and Diffeomorphism Invariant Theor…
A general diffeomorphism invariant SU(2) gauge theory is a gravity theory with two propagating polarizations of the graviton. We develop this description of gravity, in particular for future applications to the perturbative quantization.…
It is shown that target space diffeomorphism invariance of a generic Lagrangian for a set of scalar fields leads to an analog of Einstein equations for the geometry of a level set of these fields.
We present a second order gravity action which consists of ordinary Einstein action augmented by a first-order, vector like, Chern-Simons quasi topological term.This theory is ghost-free and propagates a pure spin-2 mode. It is…
Ghost-free bimetric theory can describe gravity in the presence of an extra spin-2 field. We study certain aspects of dynamics in this theory: (1) It is shown that if either of the metrics is an Einstein solution then the other is always…
We study nonlinear gravity theories in both the metric and the Palatini (metric-affine) formalisms. The nonlinear character of the gravity lagrangian in the metric formalism causes the appearance of a scalar source of matter in Einstein's…
General Relativity is usually formulated as a theory with gauge invariance under the diffeomorphism group, but there is a 'dilaton' formulation where it is in addition invariant under Weyl transformations, and a 'unimodular' formulation…
We show that various dynamical gauge theories in two, three and four dimensions, obtained as Manin deformations of topological Alexandrov-Kontsevich-Schwarz-Zaboronsky (AKSZ) theories, are equivalent to gravitational theories. Since gravity…
We propose a theory of quantum gravity which formulates the quantum theory as a nonperturbative path integral, where each spacetime history appears with a weight given by the exponentiated Einstein-Hilbert action of the corresponding causal…
We construct a Weyl transverse diffeomorphism invariant theory of teleparallel gravity by employing the Weyl compensator formalism. The low-energy dynamics has a single spin two gravition without a scalar degree of freedom. By construction,…
We consider a class of modified gravity models where the terms added to the standard Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian are just a function of the metric only. For linearized perturbations around an isotropic space-time, this class of models is…
We show that general infrared modifications of the Einstein-Hilbert action obtained by addition of curvature invariants are not viable. These modifications contain either ghosts or light gravity scalars. A very specific fine-tuning might…
We systematically study the most general Lorentz-violating graviton mass invariant under three-dimensional Eucledian group using the explicitly covariant language. We find that at general values of mass parameters the massive graviton has…
It is known that much of the structure of string theory can be derived from three-dimensional topological field theory and gravity. We show here that, at least for simple topologies, the string diffeomorphism ghosts can also be explained in…
A discrete theory of gravity locally invariant under the Poincar\'e group is considered as in a companion paper. We define a first order theory, in the sense of Palatini, on the metric-dual Voronoi complex of a simplicial complex. We follow…
Diffeomorphism invariance is often considered to be a hallmark of the theory of general relativity (GR). But closer analysis reveals that this cannot be what makes GR distinctive. The concept of diffeomorphism invariance can be defined in…
We find unitary and local theories of higher curvature gravity in the vielbein formalism, known as the Poincar\'{e} gauge theory by utilizing the equivalence to the ghost-free massive bigravity. We especially focus on three and four…
The bimetric variational principle is a subtle reinterpretation of general relativity that assumes the spacetime connection to be generated by an independent metric. Unlike the so called Palatini formalism that promotes the connection into…
In the framework of asymptotic safety, we study quantum quadratic gravity in the presence of the Higgs field considered as non-separable from the vacuum. The theory flows to a high energy fixed point where the Higgs field is strongly…
The curvature-squared model of gravity, in the affine form proposed by Weyl and Yang, is deduced from a topological action in 4D. More specifically, we start from the Pontrjagin (or Euler) invariant. Using the BRST antifield formalism with…
Einstein-Strauss Hermitian gravity was recently formulated as a gauge theory where the tangent group is taken to be the pseudo-unitary group instead of the orthogonal group. A Higgs mechanism for massive gravity was also formulated. We…