No Arabic abstract
We discuss a variation of quadratic gravity in which the gravitational interaction remains weakly coupled at all energies, but is assisted by a Yang-Mills gauge theory which becomes strong at the Planck scale. The Yang-Mills interaction is used to induce the usual Einstein-Hilbert term, which was taken to be small or absent in the original action. We study the spin-two propagator in detail, with a focus on the high mass resonance which is shifted off the real axis by the coupling to real decay channels. We calculate scattering in the $J=2$ partial wave and show explicitly that unitarity is satisfied. The theory will in general have a large cosmological constant and we study possible solutions to this, including a unimodular version of the theory. Overall, the theory satisfies our present tests for being a ultraviolet completion of quantum gravity.
Discussion of physical realization of coordinates demonstrates that the quantum theory of gravity (still absent) should be non-local and, probably, non-commutative as well.
Concerning the gravitational corrections to the running of gauge couplings two different results were reported. Some authors claim that gravitational correction at the one-loop level indicates an interesting effect of universal gravitational decreasing of gauge couplings, that is, gravitational correction works universally in the direction of asymptotic freedom no matter how the gauge coupling behaves without gravity, while others reject the presence of gravitational correction at the one-loop level at all. Being these calculations done in the framework of an effective field theory approach to general relativity, we wanted to draw attention to a recently discovered profound quantum-gravitational effect of space-time dimension running that inevitably affects the running of gauge couplings. The running of space-time dimension indicating gradual reduction of dimension as one gets into smaller scales acts on the coupling constants in the direction of asymptotic freedom and therefore in any case manifests the plausibility of this quantum-gravitational effect. Curiously enough, the results are also in perfect quantitative agreement with those of Robinson and Wilczek.
It is a well known result that any formulation of unimodular gravity is classically equivalent to General Relativity (GR), however a debate exists in the literature about this equivalence at the quantum level. In this work, we investigate the UV quantum structure of a diffeomorphism invariant formulation of unimodular gravity using functional renormalisation group methods in a Wilsonian context. We show that the effective action of the unimodular theory acquires essentially the same form with that of GR in the UV, as well as that both theories share similar UV completions within the framework of the asymptotic safety scenario for quantum gravity. Furthermore, we find that in this context the unimodular theory can appear to be non--predictive due to an increasing number of relevant couplings at high energies, and explain how this unwanted feature is in the end avoided.
In theories with discrete Abelian gauge groups, requiring that black holes be able to lose their charge as they evaporate leads to an upper bound on the product of a charged particles mass and the cutoff scale above which the effective description of the theory breaks down. This suggests that a non-trivial version of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) may also apply to gauge symmetries that are discrete, despite there being no associated massless field, therefore pushing the conjecture beyond the slogan that `gravity is the weakest force. Here, we take a step towards making this expectation more precise by studying $mathbb{Z}_N$ and $mathbb{Z}_2^N$ gauge symmetries realised via theories of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We show that applying the WGC to a dual description of an Abelian Higgs model leads to constraints that allow us to saturate but not violate existing bounds on discrete symmetries based on black hole arguments. In this setting, considering the effect of discrete hair on black holes naturally identifies the cutoff of the effective theory with the scale of spontaneous symmetry breaking, and provides a mechanism through which discrete hair can be lost without modifying the gravitational sector. We explore the possible implications of these arguments for understanding the smallness of the weak scale compared to $M_{Pl}$.
Pure gauge theories for de Sitter, anti de Sitter and orthogonal groups, in four-dimensional Euclidean spacetime, are studied. It is shown that, if the theory is asymptotically free and a dynamical mass is generated, then an effective geometry may be induced and a gravity theory emerges.