相关论文: Torsional instanton effects in quantum gravity

This is a brief summary of our studies of quantum field theories in a special limit in which the instantons are present, the anti-instantons are absent, and the perturbative corrections are reduced to one-loop. We analyze the corresponding…

We show that axions interacting with abelian gauge fields obtain a potential from loops of magnetic monopoles. This is a consequence of the Witten effect: the axion field causes the monopoles to acquire an electric charge and alters their…

A topological version of four-dimensional (Euclidean) Einstein gravity which we propose regards anti-self-dual 2-forms and an anti-self-dual part of the frame connections as fundamental fields. The theory describes the moduli spaces of…

It has recently been pointed out that the existence of massless chiral edge excitations has important strong coupling consequences for the topological concept of an instanton vacuum. In the first part of this paper we elaborate on the…

We consider an analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in quantum field theory: the fermionic vacuum attains nontrivial quantum numbers in the background of a magnetic vortex even in the case when the spatial region of nonvanishing external…

We discuss instantons on noncommutative four-dimensional Euclidean space. In commutative case one can consider instantons directly on Euclidean space, then we should restrict ourselves to the gauge fields that are gauge equivalent to the…

The canonical theory of quantum gravity in the loop representation can be extended to incorporate topology change, in the simple case that this refers to the creation or annihilation of "minimalist wormholes" in which two points of the…

The axion Weak Gravity Conjecture implies that when parametrically increasing the axion decay constants, instanton corrections become increasingly important. We provide strong evidence for the validity of this conjecture by studying the…

A nonlocal quantum gravity theory is presented which is finite and unitary to all orders of perturbation theory. Vertex form factors in Feynman diagrams involving gravitons suppress graviton and matter vacuum fluctuation loops by…

Within the context of finding the initial conditions of the universe we consider gravitational instantons falling into the Bianchi IX classification. That is, a Euclidean four-manifold with a metric that satisfies Einstein's equations with…

The Einstein equation in a semi-classical approximation is applied to a spherical region of the universe, with the stress-energy tensor consisting of the mass density and pressure of the LambdaCDM cosmological model plus an additional…

An analysis is performed of instanton configurations in pure Euclidean Yang-Mills theory containing small Lorentz-violating perturbations that maintain gauge invariance. Conventional topological arguments are used to show that the general…

We study instanton solutions and superpotentials for the large number of vacua of the plane-wave matrix model and a 2+1 dimensional Super Yang-Mills theory on $R\times S^2$ with sixteen supercharges. We get the superpotential in the weak…

We study how instantons arise in the low energy effective theory of the SU(2) Yang-Mills theory in the context of the non-linear sigma model recently propose by Faddeev and Niemi. We find a simple relation between the instanton number $\nu$…

Vacuum decay in de Sitter space is a process of great physical interest, as it allows to rule out cosmological models in the early and current Universe. Its rate may be described in terms of an instanton in Euclidean space called bounce and…

We develop a worldline-instanton approach for calculating the momentum spectrum of particles produced by gravitational fields which depend on both space and time. The instantons are open. The middle part is complex and describes the…

We show that charged Eguchi-Hanson instantons provide a concrete and calculable new source of intrinsic Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking by quantum gravity. The size of this breaking is shown to depend sensitively on the short distance…

We study four dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant deformed by the Nieh-Yan torsional topological invariant with a spacetime-dependent coefficient. We find an exact solution of the Euclidean system, which we call the…

We study the formation of gravitating global strings through quantum mechanical tunneling. The instantons that describe the nucleation process are characterized by two parameters: the string core thickness and its gravitational backreaction…

We study pseudoscalar inflation in the Einstein-Cartan-Palatini (first-order) formulation of gravity while allowing for torsion. We introduce two non-minimal interactions in the gravitational sector: pseudoscalar couplings to the Pontryagin…