A possibility of journeys through antigravity has recently been proposed, with the suggestion that Weyl-invariant extension of scalars coupled to Einstein gravity allows for an unambiguous classical evolution through cosmological singularities in anisotropic spacetimes. We compute the Weyl invariant curvature squared and find that it blows up for the proposed anisotropic solution both at the Big Crunch as well as at the Big Bang. Therefore the cosmological singularities are not resolved by uplifting Einstein theory to a Weyl invariant model.
Geodesic incompleteness is a problem in both general relativity and string theory. The Weyl invariant Standard Model coupled to General Relativity (SM+GR), and a similar treatment of string theory, are improved theories that are geodesically complete. A notable prediction of this approach is that there must be antigravity regions of spacetime connected to gravity regions through gravitational singularities such as those that occur in black holes and cosmological bang/crunch. Antigravity regions introduce apparent problems of ghosts that raise several questions of physical interpretation. It was shown that unitarity is not violated but there may be an instability associated with negative kinetic energies in the antigravity regions. In this paper we show that the apparent problems can be resolved with the interpretation of the theory from the perspective of observers strictly in the gravity region. Such observers cannot experience the negative kinetic energy in antigravity directly, but can only detect in and out signals that interact with the antigravity region. This is no different than a spacetime black box for which the information about its interior is encoded in scattering amplitudes for in/out states at its exterior. Through examples we show that negative kinetic energy in antigravity presents no problems of principles but is an interesting topic for physical investigations of fundamental significance.
We propose a way to observe the photon ring of the asymptotically anti-de Sitter black hole dual to a superconductor on the two-dimensional sphere. We consider the electric current of the superconductor under the localized time-periodic external electromagnetic field. On the gravity side, the bulk Maxwell field is sent from the AdS boundary and then diffracted by the black hole. We construct the image of the black hole from the asymptotic data of the bulk Maxwell field that corresponds to the electric current on the field theory side. We decompose the electric current into the dissipative and non-dissipative parts and take the dissipative part for the imaging of the black hole. We investigate the effect of the charged scalar condensate on the image. We obtain the bulk images that indicate the discontinuous change of the size of the photon ring.
We point out a new phenomenon which seems to be generic in 4d effective theories of scalar fields coupled to Einstein gravity, when applied to cosmology. A lift of such theories to a Weyl-invariant extension allows one to define classical evolution through cosmological singularities unambiguously, and hence construct geodesically complete background spacetimes. An attractor mechanism ensures that, at the level of the effective theory, generic solutions undergo a big crunch/big bang transition by contracting to zero size, passing through a brief antigravity phase, shrinking to zero size again, and re-emerging into an expanding normal gravity phase. The result may be useful for the construction of complete bouncing cosmologies like the cyclic model.
We investigate the marginally stable modes of the scalar (vector) perturbations in the AdS soliton background coupled to electric field. In the probe limit, we find that the marginally stable modes can reveal the onset of the phase transitions of this model. The critical chemical potentials obtained from this approach are in good agreement with the previous numerical or analytical results.
The role of chirality is discussed in unifying the anomaly and the tunneling formalisms for deriving the Hawking effect. Using the chirality condition and starting from the familiar form of the trace anomaly, the chiral (gravitational) anomaly, manifested as a nonconservation of the stress tensor, near the horizon of a black hole, is derived. Solution of this equation yields the stress tensor whose asymptotic infinity limit gives the Hawking flux. Finally, use of the same chirality condition in the tunneling formalism gives the Hawking temperature that is compatible with the flux obtained by anomaly method.