Related papers: Ward Identities and Anomalies in Pure W_4 Gravity
The general solutions of the Wess-Zumino consistency condition for the conformal (or Weyl, or trace) anomalies are derived. The solutions are obtained, in arbitrary dimensions, by explicitly computing the cohomology of the corresponding…
In this thesis we study several problems in the context of AdS/CFT. The first is that of gravitational phase transitions between AdS and dS geometries in the Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity. Such transitions are mediated by thermalons and do…
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We present evidence that there is a 4D model that satisfies the conditions of renormalizability and diffeomorphism invariance simultaneously at the 2-loop level. The traceless mode is treated perturbatively, while the conformal mode can be…
This thesis is devoted to exploring various fundamental issues within asymptotic safety. Firstly, we study the reconstruction problem and present two ways in which to solve it within the context of scalar field theory, by utilising a…
After a review of the canonical reduction to the rest-frame Wigner-covariant instant form of standard theories in Minkowski spacetime, a new formulation of tetrad gravity is introduced. Its canonical reduction, also in presence of N scalar…
We study spherical charged black holes in the presence of a cosmological constant with corrections motivated by the theory of loop quantum gravity. The effective theory is constructed at the Hamiltonian level by introducing certain…
New phenomenological models of Quantum Gravity have suggested that a Lorentz-Invariant discrete spacetime structure may become manifest through a nonstandard coupling of matter fields and spacetime curvature. On the other hand, there is…
We analyze the dynamics of an AdS5 braneworld with matter fields when gravity is allowed to deviate from the Einstein form on the brane. We consider exact 5-dimensional warped solutions which are associated with conformal bulk fields of…
This thesis is devoted to the study of gravitational theories which can be seen as modifications or generalisations of General Relativity. The motivation for considering such theories, stemming from Cosmology, High Energy Physics and…
We present a systematic approach to supersymmetric holographic renormalization for a generic 5D $\mathcal{N}=2$ gauged supergravity theory with matter multiplets, including its fermionic sector, with all gauge fields consistently set to…
Commutator anomalies obstruct solving the Wheeler-DeWitt constraint equation in Dirac quantization of quantum gravity-matter theory. When the obstruction is removed, there result quantal modifications to the constraints. The same classical…
Using the background-metric independence for the traceless mode as well as the conformal mode, 4D quantum gravity is described as a quantum field theory defined on a non-dynamical background-metric. The measure then induces an action with 4…
Unimodular gravity can be formulated so that transverse diffeomorphisms and Weyl transformations are symmetries of the theory. For this formulation of unimodular gravity, we work out the two-point and three-point $h_{\mu\nu}$ contributions…
We show how classical and quantum dualities, as well as duality relations that appear only in a sector of certain theories ("emergent dualities"), can be unveiled, and systematically established. Our method relies on the use of morphisms of…
Starting from the original Einstein action, sometimes called the Gamma squared action, we propose a new setup to formulate modified theories of gravity. This can yield a theory with second order field equations similar to those found in…
We provide a novel model of gravity by using adjoint frame fields in four dimensions. It has a natural interpretation as a gravitational theory of a complex metric field, which describes interactions between two real metrics. The classical…
The quantum dynamics of the gravitational field non-minimally coupled to an (also dynamical) scalar field is studied in the {\em broken phase}. For a particular value of the coupling the system is classically conformal, and can actually be…
The BRST anomaly which may be present in the induced $W_n$ gravity quantized on the light-cone is evaluated in the geometrical framework of Zucchini. The cocycles linked by the cohomology of the BRST operator to the anomaly are…
We discuss the use of BRST symmetry and the resulting Ward identities for orbifold gauge theories as consistency checks in an arbitrary number of dimensions. We verify that both the usual orbifold symmetry breaking and the recently proposed…