Related papers: Stabilizing the gravitational action and Coleman's…
We use the recently discovered universality of Einstein equations in the first order formalism to suggest a positive definite Euclidean action. Possible implications for quantum gravity are considered. We discuss the Hawking and Coleman…
We show that that four dimensional conformal gravity plus a simple Neumann boundary condition can be used to get the semiclassical (or tree level) wavefunction of the universe of four dimensional asymptotically de-Sitter or Euclidean…
Following the reasoning of Claudson and Halpern, it is shown that "fifth-time" stabilized quantum gravity is equivalent to Langevin evolution (i.e. stochastic quantization) between fixed non-singular, but otherwise arbitrary, initial and…
The scheme of using the Chern-Simons action to regularize the gravitational Hamiltonian constraint is extended to including the Lorentzian term in the $k=0$ cosmological model. The Euclidean term and the Lorenzian term are thus regularized…
The Greensite-Halpern method of stabilizing bottomless Euclidean actions is applied to zerodimensional O(N) sigma models with unstable $A_k$ singularities in the $N = \infty$ limit.
We present a new mechanism for addressing the cosmological constant problem based on global constraints arising from a lapse function in a higher-dimensional gravitational theory. Inspired by Horava-Lifshitz gravity, we consider a 5d…
The validity of the Coleman mechanism, which automatically tunes the fundamental constants, is examined in two-dimensional and four-dimensional quantum gravity theories. First, we consider two-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity on…
When the semi-positive cosmological constant is dynamical, the naive Euclidean Einstein action is unbounded from below and the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe is not normalizable. With the inclusion of back-reaction (a crucial…
We review selected aspects of unimodular gravity and we discuss its viability as a solution of the old cosmological constant problem. In unimodular gravity the cosmological constant is promoted to a global degree of freedom. We highlight…
We revisit a mechanism proposed by Hawking to resolve the cosmological constant problem (and the controversy it generated) to identify possibly more palatable alternatives and explore new connections and interpretations. In particular,…
We discuss the hypothesis of a fixed point for quantum gravity coupled to a scalar, in the limit where the scalar field goes to infinity, accompanied by a suitable scaling of the metric. We propose that no scalar potential is present for…
In this paper I continue the investigation in \cite{1,1b} concerning my proposal on the nature of the cosmological constant. In particular, I study both mathematically and physically the quantum Planckian context and I provide, in order to…
The minimal theory of quasidilaton massive gravity with or without a Horndeski-type kinetic term for the quasidilaton field propagates only three physical modes: the two massive tensor polarizations and one scalar mode. This reduced number…
We prove that semiclassical gravity in conformally static, globally hyperbolic spacetimes with a massless, conformally coupled Klein-Gordon field is well posed, when viewed as a coupled theory for the dynamical conformal factor of the…
We present a new reformulation of the canonical quantum geometrodynamics, which allows to overcome the fundamental problem of the frozen formalism and, therefore, to construct an appropriate Hilbert space associate to the solution of the…
We derive field equations of Gauss-Bonnet gravity in 4 dimensions after dimensional reduction of the action and demonstrate that in this scenario Vainshtein mechanism operates in the flat spherically symmetric background. We show that…
We present a class of generally covariant nonlocal gravity models which have a flat-space general relativistic (GR) limit and also possess a stable de Sitter (dS) or Anti-de Sitter (AdS) background with an arbitrary value of its…
A deterministic method is proposed for solving the Boltzmann equation. The method employs a Galerkin discretization of the velocity space and adopts, as trial and test functions, the collocation basis functions based on weights and roots of…
A quantization of unimodular gravity is described, which results in a quantum effective action which is also unimodular, ie a function of a metric with fixed determinant. A consequence is that contributions to the energy momentum tensor of…
We show that the problem of stabilization of extra dimensions in Kaluza-Klein type cosmology may be solved in a theory of gravity involving high-order curvature invariants. The method suggested (employing a slow-change approximation) can…