No Arabic abstract
Local gravitational theories with more than four derivatives have remarkable quantum properties, e.g., they are super-renormalizable and may be unitary in the Lee-Wick sense. Therefore, it is important to explore also the IR limit of these theories and identify observable signatures of the higher derivatives. In the present work we study the scattering of a photon by a classical external gravitational field in the sixth-derivative model whose propagator contains only real, simple poles. Also, we discuss the possibility of a gravitational seesaw-like mechanism, which could allow the make up of a relatively small physical mass from the huge massive parameters of the action. If possible, this mechanism would be a way out of the Planck suppression, affecting the gravitational deflection of low energy photons. It turns out that the mechanism which actually occurs works only to shift heavier masses to the further UV region. This fact may be favourable for protecting the theory from instabilities, but makes experimental detection of higher derivatives more difficult.
The most simple superrenormalizable model of quantum gravity is based on the general local covariant six-derivative action. In addition to graviton such a theory has massive scalar and tensor modes. It was shown recently that in the case when the massive poles emerge in complex conjugate pairs, the theory has also unitary $S$-matrix and hence can be seen as a candidate to be a consistent quantum gravity theory. In the present work we construct the modified Newton potential and explore the gravitational light bending in a general six-derivative theory, including the most interesting case of complex massive poles. In the case of the light deflection the results are obtained within classical and semiclassical approaches.
We hereby derive the Newtonian metric potentials for the fourth-derivative gravity including the one-loop logarithm quantum corrections. It is explicitly shown that the behavior of the modified Newtonian potential near the origin is improved respect to the classical one, but this is not enough to remove the curvature singularity in $r=0$. Our result is grounded on a rigorous proof based on numerical and analytic computations.
We present, in an explicit form, the metric for all spherically symmetric Schwarzschild-Bach black holes in Einstein-Weyl theory. In addition to the black hole mass, this complete family of spacetimes involves a parameter that encodes the value of the Bach tensor on the horizon. When this additional non-Schwarzschild parameter is set to zero the Bach tensor vanishes everywhere and the Schwa-Bach solution reduces to the standard Schwarzschild metric of general relativity. Compared with previous studies, which were mainly based on numerical integration of a complicated form of field equations, the new form of the metric enables us to easily investigate geometrical and physical properties of these black holes, such as specific tidal effects on test particles, caused by the presence of the Bach tensor, as well as fundamental thermodynamical quantities.
In literature there is a model of modified gravity in which the matter Lagrangian is coupled to the geometry via trace of the stress-energy momentum tensor $T=T_{mu}^{mu}$. This type of modified gravity is called as $f(R,T)$ in which $R$ is Ricci scalar $R=R_{mu}^{mu}$. We extend manifestly this model to include the higher derivative term $Box R$. We derived equation of motion (EOM) for the model by starting from the basic variational principle. Later we investigate FLRW cosmology for our model. We show that de Sitter solution is unstable for a generic type of $f(R,Box R, T)$ model. Furthermore we investigate an inflationary scenario based on this model. A graceful exit from inflation is guaranteed in this type of modified gravity.
In this paper we review the derivation of light bending obtained before the discovery of General Relativity (GR). It is intended for students learning GR or specialist that will find new lights and connexions on these historic derivations. Since 1915, it is well known that the observed light bending stems from two contributions : the first one is directly deduced from the equivalence principle alone and was obtained by Einstein in 1911; the second one comes from the spatial curvature of spacetime. In GR, those two components are equal, but other relativistic theories of gravitation can give different values to those contributions. In this paper, we give a simple explanation, based on the wave-particle picture of why the first term, which relies on the equivalence principle, is identical to the one obtained by a purely Newtonian analysis. In this context of wave analysis, we emphasize that the dependency of the velocity of light with the gravitational potential, as deduced by Einstein concerns the phase velocity. Then, we wonder whether Einstein could have envisaged already in 1911 the second contribution, and therefore the correct result. We argue that considering a length contraction in the radial direction, along with the time dilation implied by the equivalence principle, could have led Einstein to the correct result.