English

Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-02-14 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

General Relativity has shown an outstanding observational success in the scales where it has been directly tested. However, modifications have been intensively explored in the regimes where it seems either incomplete or signals its own limit of validity. In particular, the breakdown of unitarity near the Planck scale strongly suggests that General Relativity needs to be modified at high energies and quantum gravity effects are expected to be important. This is related to the existence of spacetime singularities when the solutions of General Relativity are extrapolated to regimes where curvatures are large. In this sense, Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity have shown an extraordinary ability to regularise the gravitational dynamics, leading to non-singular cosmologies and regular black hole spacetimes in a very robust manner and without resorting to quantum gravity effects. This has boosted the interest in these theories in applications to stellar structure, compact objects, inflationary scenarios, cosmological singularities, and black hole and wormhole physics, among others. We review the motivations, various formulations, and main results achieved within these theories, including their observational viability, and provide an overview of current open problems and future research opportunities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.03351,
  title  = {Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity},
  author = {Jose Beltran Jimenez and Lavinia Heisenberg and Gonzalo J. Olmo and Diego Rubiera-Garcia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.03351},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

212 pages, Review under press at Physics Reports

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:14:17.852Z