Related papers: The fate of four dimensions
In this letter we investigate some consequences of considering our 4D observable universe as locally and isometrically embeded into a 5D spacetime, where gravity is described by a Brans-Dicke theory in vacuum. Once we impose the embeding…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
Cascading gravity is an explicit realization of the idea of degravitation, where gravity behaves as a high-pass filter. This could explain why a large cosmological constant does not backreact as much as anticipated from standard General…
A mechanism of inflation from higher dimensions compactification is studied. An Early Universe capable of providing exponential growth for some dimensions and exponential contraction for others, giving therefore an explanation for the big…
We describe new no-go theorems for producing four-dimensional accelerating universes from warped dimensional reduction. The new theorems improve upon previous results by including dynamical extra dimensions and by treating four-dimensional…
We construct an intersecting brane configuration in six-dimensional space with one extra space-like and one extra time-like dimensions. With a certain additional symmetry imposed on the extra space-time we have found that effective…
We hypothesize that the vacuum is spontaneously shifted from the self-dual point in the moduli space, at which all dimensions are compact, and that the true vacuum results from the decompactification of the four space-time dimensions and…
Despite their diversity, many of the most prominent candidate theories of quantum gravity share the property to be effectively lower-dimensional at small scales. In particular, dimension two plays a fundamental role in the finiteness of…
The problem of explaining the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and the observational and theoretical difficulties associated with dark matter and dark energy are discussed. The possibility that Einstein gravity does not…
Brane-world models where observers are trapped within the thickness of a 3-brane offer novel perspectives on gravitation and cosmology. In this essay, I would argue that the problem of a late epoch acceleration of the universe is well…
The Euclidean or Bunch-Davies O(4,1) invariant 'vacuum' state of quantum fields in global de Sitter space is shown to be unstable to small perturbations, even for a massive free field with no self-interactions. There are perturbations of…
If quantum fields exist in extra compact dimensions, they will give rise to a quantum vacuum or Casimir energy. That vacuum energy will manifest itself as a cosmological constant. The fact that supernova and cosmic microwave background data…
Cosmic acceleration may be the result of unknown physical processes involving either new fields in high energy physics or modifications of gravitation theory. In the latter case, such modifications are usually related to the existence of…
Some superstring theories have more than one effective low-energy limit, corresponding to classical spacetimes with different dimensionalities. We argue that all but the 3+1-dimensional one might correspond to ``dead worlds'', devoid of…
In this thesis the cosmological constant is investigated from two points of view. First, we study the influence of a time-dependent cosmological constant on the late-time expansion of the universe. Thereby, we consider several combinations…
In this paper we study a new symmetry argument that results in a vacuum state with strictly vanishing vacuum energy. This argument exploits the well-known feature that de Sitter and Anti- de Sitter space are related by analytic…
A very large extra dimension may contain many localized branes. We discuss the possibility to formulate such models as a spin system where each spin indicates the supersymmetry direction preserved by the corresponding brane. In the…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
String theory contains sources like orientifold planes that support higher derivative interactions. These interactions make possible static flux compactifications which are forbidden in supergravity. They can also lead to violations of the…
We point out that the weakly turbulent instability of anti-de Sitter space, recently found in arXiv:1104.3702 for four dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant, is…