Related papers: Ghost Equations and Diffeomorphism Invariant Theor…
Massive gravity has seen a resurgence of interest due to recent progress which has overcome its traditional problems, yielding an avenue for addressing important open questions such as the cosmological constant naturalness problem. The…
Spinor gravity is a functional integral formulation of gravity based only on fundamental spinor fields. The vielbein and metric arise as composite objects. Due to the lack of local Lorentz-symmetry new invariants in the effective…
Fefferman and Graham showed some time ago that four dimensional conformal geometries could be analyzed in terms of six dimensional, ambient, Riemannian geometries admitting a closed homothety. Recently it was shown how conformal geometry…
We obtain a manifestly background independent BRST quantization of the $\N=4$ supersymmetric spinning particle. We show that nilpotency of the BRST charge $Q$ implies the Einstein equations admitting a cosmological constant of indefinite…
We classify all the first-order vertices of gravity consistently coupled to a system of 2-form gauge fields by computing the local BRST cohomology H(s|d) in ghost number 0 and form degree n. The consistent deformations are at most linear in…
We show that the phase space of three-dimensional gravity contains two layers of dualities: between diffeomorphisms and a notion of "dual diffeomorphisms" on the one hand, and between first order curvature and torsion on the other hand.…
We study a deSitter/Anti-deSitter/Poincare Yang-Mills theory of gravity in d-space-time dimensions in an attempt to retain the best features of both general relativity and Yang-Mills theory: quadratic curvature, dimensionless coupling and…
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…
We show that the strong self-interaction of the scalar polarization of a massive graviton can be understood in terms of the propagation of an extra ghost-like degree of freedom, thus relating strong coupling to the sixth degree of freedom…
In this paper, we present a new formulation of topological conformal gravity in four dimensions. Such a theory was first considered by Witten as a possible gravitational counterpart of topological Yang-Mills theory, but several problems…
General Relativity is not the definitive theory of Gravitation due to several shortcomings which are coming out both from theoretical and experimental viewpoints. At large scales (astrophysical and cosmological scales) the attempts to match…
We study the general class of gravitational field theories constructed on the basis of scale invariance (and therefore absence of any mass parameters) and invariance under transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff), which are the 4-volume…
A generalization of General Relativity is studied. The standard Einstein-Hilbert action is considered in the Palatini formalism, where the connection and the metric are independent variables, and the connection is not symmetric. As a result…
The late-time cosmic acceleration may be due to infra-red modifications of General Relativity. In particular, we consider a maximal extension of the Hilbert-Einstein action and analyze several interesting features of the theory. Generally,…
The cosmological constant problem and the compatibility of gravity with quantum mechanics are the two most pressing problems in all of gravitational theory. While string theory nicely addresses the latter, it has so far failed to provide…
Conventional quantization of two-dimensional diffeomorphism and Weyl invariant theories sacrifices the latter symmetry to anomalies, while maintaining the former. When alternatively Weyl invariance is preserved by abandoning diffeomorphism…
The quadratic theory of gravity is the unique renormalizable theory of quantum gravity in 4 dimensions, as proved by K. S. Stelle in 1977. Over the decades, the theory has been understood to contain a massive tensor ghost, and several…
We construct a class of Einstein-vector theories where the vector field couples bilinearly to the curvature polynomials of arbitrary order in such a way that only Riemann tensor rather than its derivative enters the equations of motion. The…
In this article, the question of the nature of cold dark matter is approached from a new angle. By invoking the Cauchy problem of relativity it is shown how, under very precise astrophysical conditions, the Einstein general theory of…
We give a variational formulation of General Relativity, with coupling to a cosmological constant, to scalar fields, to vector fields and to spinor fields (all with possible mass and interaction terms). Among the matter fields, we include…