No Arabic abstract
We reply to the recent criticism by Garriga and Tanaka of our proposal that quantum gravitational loop corrections may lead to a secular screening of the effective cosmological constant. Their argument rests upon a renormalization scheme in which the composite operator $(R sqrt{-g} - 4 Lambda sqrt{-g} )_{rm ren}$ is defined to be the trace of the renormalized field equations. Although this is a peculiar prescription, we show that it {it does not preclude secular screening}. Moreover, we show that a constant Ricci scalar {it does not even classically} imply a constant expansion rate. Other important points are: (1) the quantity $R_{rm ren}$ of Garriga and Tanaka is neither a properly defined composite operator, nor is it constant; (2) gauge dependence does not render a Greens function devoid of physical content; (3) scalar models on a non-dynamical de Sitter background (for which there is no gauge issue) can induce arbitrarily large secular contributions to the stress tensor; (4) the same secular corrections appear in observable quantities in quantum gravity; and (5) the prospects seem good for deriving a simple stochastic formulation of quantum gravity in which the leading secular effects can be summed and for which the expectation values of even complicated, gauge invariant operators can be computed at leading order.
We review some theoretical and phenomenological aspects of massive gravities in 4 dimensions. We start from the Fierz--Pauli theory with Lorentz-invariant mass terms and then proceed to Lorentz-violating masses. Unlike the former theory, some models with Lorentz-violation have no pathologies in the spectrum in flat and nearly flat backgrounds and lead to interesting phenomenology.
It is known that in the theory of light scalar fields during inflation, correlation functions suffer from infrared (IR) divergences or large IR loop corrections, leading to the breakdown of perturbation theory. In order to understand the physical meaning of such IR enhancement, we investigate the stochastic properties of an effective equation of motion (EoM) for long-wavelength modes of a canonically normalized light scalar field $phi$ with a general sufficiently flat interaction potential on de Sitter background. Firstly, we provide an alternative refined derivation of the effective action for long-wavelength modes which leads to the effective EoM that correctly reproduces all the IR correlation functions in a good approximation at a late time, by integrating out short-wavelength modes. Next, under the assumption that one can neglect non-local correlations in the influence functional exceeding the coarse-graining scale, we show that the effective EoM for IR modes of the average field in Schwinger-Keldysh formalism $phi^<_c$ can be interpreted as a classical stochastic process in the present model.
We study quantum corrections to holographic entanglement entropy in AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$; these are given by the bulk entanglement entropy across the Ryu-Takayanagi surface for all fields in the effective gravitational theory. We consider bulk $U(1)$ gauge fields and gravitons, whose dynamics in AdS$_3$ are governed by Chern-Simons terms and are therefore topological. In this case the relevant Hilbert space is that of the edge excitations. A novelty of the holographic construction is that such modes live not only on the bulk entanglement cut but also on the AdS boundary. We describe the interplay of these excitations and provide an explicit map to the appropriate extended Hilbert space. We compute the bulk entanglement entropy for the CFT vacuum state and find that the effect of the bulk entanglement entropy is to renormalize the relation between the effective holographic central charge and Newtons constant. We also consider excited states obtained by acting with the $U(1)$ current on the vacuum, and compute the difference in bulk entanglement entropy between these states and the vacuum. We compute this UV-finite difference both in the bulk and in the CFT finding a perfect agreement.
In this Reply, we respond to the above Comment. Our computation [Phys. Rev. D 91 (2015) 074512] only took into account pure QCD effects, arising from quark mass differences, so it is not surprising that there are discrepancies in isospin splittings and in the Sigma - Lambda mixing angle. We expect that these discrepancies will be smaller in a full calculation incorporating QED effects.
We study to what extent the spectral index $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ determine the field excursion $Deltaphi$ during inflation. We analyse the possible degeneracy of $Delta phi$ by comparing three broad classes of inflationary models, with different dependence on the number of e-foldings $N$, to benchmark models of chaotic inflation with monomial potentials. The classes discussed cover a large set of inflationary single field models. We find that the field range is not uniquely determined for any value of $(n_s, r)$; one can have the same predictions as chaotic inflation and a very different $Delta phi$. Intriguingly, we find that the field range cannot exceed an upper bound that appears in different classes of models. Finally, $Delta phi$ can even become sub-Planckian, but this requires to go beyond the single-field slow-roll paradigm.