Related papers: Topics in particle physics and cosmology beyond th…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…
We show how a nonlocal gravitational interaction can circumvent the Weinberg no-go theorem on cosmological constant, which forbids the existence of any solution to the cosmological constant problem within the context of local field theories…
We study a theory where the presence of an extra spin-two field coupled to gravity gives rise to a phase with spontaneously broken Lorentz symmetry. In this phase gravity is massive, and the Weak Equivalence Principle is respected. The…
The standard model of elementary particle physics and the theory of general relativity can be extended by the introduction of a vacuum variable which is responsible for the near vanishing of the present cosmological constant (vacuum energy…
Gravitational theories with Lorentz violation must account for a number of possible features in order to be consistent theoretically and phenomenologically. A brief summary of these features is given here. They include evasion of a no-go…
One of the main problems that emergent-gravity approaches face is explaining how a system that does not contain gauge symmetries ab initio might develop them effectively in some regime. We review a mechanism introduced by some of the…
If textbook Lorentz invariance is actually a property of the equations describing a sector of the excitations of vacuum above some critical distance scale, several sectors of matter with different critical speeds in vacuum can coexist and…
When the supersymmetry breaking sector is a fluid background, Lorentz invariance is broken spontaneously. The super-Higgs mechanism leads to a gravitino Lagrangian with Lorentz symmetry violating terms. We analyse the resulting field…
We present a modified gravity framework where the vacuum is modeled as a Higgs-type scalar field $\chi$ undergoing spontaneous symmetry breaking. By introducing a coupling $Q^\nu = \alpha T \nabla^\nu \chi$, we formalize a displacement…
Major issues arising in the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation are reviewed. These issues, although being principally important, are very often misunderstood, which results in wrong conclusions. The basic point is global gauge symmetry…
We investigate spacetimes in which the speed of light along flat 4D sections varies over the extra dimensions due to different warp factors for the space and the time coordinates (``asymmetrically warped'' spacetimes). The main property of…
The most prominent realization of gravity as a gauge theory similar to the gauge theories of the standard model comes from enlarging the gauge group from the Lorentz group to the de Sitter group. To regain ordinary Einstein-Cartan gravity…
We study all translationally and rotationally invariant local theories involving massless spin 2 and spin 1 particles that mediate long range forces, allowing for general energy relations and violation of boost invariance. Although gauge…
We investigate spontaneous symmetry breaking in a conformally invariant gravitational model. In particular, we use a conformally invariant scalar tensor theory as the vacuum sector of a gravitational model to examine the idea that…
Gravity stands out among the fundamental interactions because of its apparent incompatibility with having a quantum description. Moreover, thermodynamic aspects of gravitation theory appears as puzzling features of some classical solutions…
The stability of our vacuum is analyzed and several aspects concerning this question are reviewed. 1) In the standard Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model we review the instability towards the formation of a bubble of lower energy density and…
Lorentz invariance is one of the fundamental principles of physics, and, as such, it must be experimentally tested. The purpose of this work is to obtain, within the Standard-Model Extension, the dynamics of a Lorentz-violating spinor in a…
A theory with the action combining the Einstein--Hilbert term and graviton mass terms violating Lorentz invariance is considered at linearized level about Minkowskian background. It is shown that with one of the masses set equal to zero,…
It is shown that gravitation naturally emerges from the standard model of particle physics if local scale invariance is imposed in the context of a single conformal (Weyl-symmetric) theory. Gravitation is then conformally-related to the…
Recently a family of solutions of Einstein equations in backgrounds with broken Lorentz invariance was found ArXiv:0712.1136. We show that the gravitational solution recently obtained by Kachru, Liu and Mulligan in ArXiv:0808.1725 is a part…