Related papers: The Flavour of Gravity
Modern astronomical observations in cosmology provide increasingly strong evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Explanations of the cosmic acceleration within the framework of general relativity use the hypothesis…
Through the discussion of the fundamental properties of Lagrangian density for a gravitational system, the theoretical foundations of the modified Einstein field equations and the Lorentz and Levi-Civita conservation laws are systematically…
Vielbeins are necessary when coupling General Relativity (GR) to fermionic matter. This enhances the gauge group of GR to include local Lorentz transformations. In view of a reduced phase space formulation of quantum gravity, in this work…
The issues of quintessence and cosmic acceleration can be discussed in the framework of higher order theories of gravity. We can define effective pressure and energy density directly connected to the Ricci scalar of curvature of a generic…
We investigate isotropic and homogeneous cosmological scenarios in the scalar-tensor theory of gravity with non-minimal derivative coupling of a scalar field to the curvature given by the term $(\zeta/H_0^2) G^{\mu\nu}\nabla_\mu\phi…
A generalized quintessence model is presented which corresponds to a richer vacuum structure that, besides a time-dependent, slowly varying scalar field, contains a varying cosmological term. From first principles we determine a number of…
The semiclassical interaction of the gravitational with a quantum scalar field is considered, in view of the renormalizability of the associated energy-momentum tensor in a n-dimensional curved spacetime resulting from a quadratic…
An introduction is given to discussions on the possiblity of fabricating spacetime geometries allowing time-travel scenarios with the help of matter possessing typically quantum features. Those scenarios are considered in the framework of…
The Lorentzian spacetime metric is replaced by an area metric which naturally emerges as a generalized geometry in quantum string and gauge theory. Employing the area metric curvature scalar, the gravitational Einstein-Hilbert action is…
We here conjecture that two much-studied aspects of quantum gravity, dimensional flow and spacetime fuzziness, might be deeply connected. We illustrate the mechanism, providing first evidence in support of our conjecture, by working within…
We investigate the cosmological applications of new gravitational scalar-tensor theories, which are novel modifications of gravity possessing 2+2 propagating degrees of freedom, arising from a Lagrangian that includes the Ricci scalar and…
The requirement that both the matter and the geometry of a spacetime canonically evolve together, starting and ending on shared Cauchy surfaces and independently of the intermediate foliation, leaves one with little choice for…
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…
Emergent gravity can be applied to a large $N$ matrix model by considering the vacuum of a noncommutative (NC) Coulomb branch that satisfies the Heisenberg algebra. Due to the fact that IR fluctuations in the NC Coulomb branch always pair…
The effect of capture of a cosmic object by the central gravitational field of a galaxy cluster is described in the expanding Universe. The cosmic evolution can be the origin of the capture explaining formation of galaxies and their…
Beginning with a decomposition of the Newtonian field of gravity, I show that four classical color fields can be associated with the gravitational field. The meaning of color here is that these fields do not add up to yield the Newtonian…
Quantum gravity is expected to be necessary in order to understand situations where classical general relativity breaks down. In particular in cosmology one has to deal with initial singularities, i.e. the fact that the backward evolution…
We propose that at the beginning of the universe gravity existed in a limbo either because it was switched off or because it was only conformally coupled to all particles. This picture can be reverse-engineered from the requirement that the…
We will highlight that despite there being various approaches to quantum gravity, there are universal approach-independent features of quantum gravity. The geometry of spacetime becomes an emergent structure, which emerges from some purely…
There is a formal analogy between the evolution of the universe, when this is seen as a trajectory in the minisuperspace, and the worldline followed by a test particle in a curved spacetime. The analogy can be extended to the quantum realm,…