No Arabic abstract
We make a full classification of scalar monomials built of the Riemann curvature tensor up to the quadratic order and of the covariant derivatives of the scalar field up to the third order. From the point of view of the effective field theory, the third or even higher order covariant derivatives of the scalar field are of the same order as the higher curvature terms, and thus should be taken into account. Moreover, higher curvature terms and higher order derivatives of the scalar field are complementary to each other, of which novel ghost-free combinations may exist. We make a systematic classification of all the possible monomials, according to the numbers of Riemann tensor and higher derivatives of the scalar field in each monomial. Complete basis of monomials at each order are derived, of which linear combinations may yield novel ghost-free Lagrangians. We also develop a diagrammatic representation of the monomials, which may help to simplify the analysis.
We investigate the correspondence between generally covariant higher derivative scalar-tensor theory and spatially covariant gravity theory. The building blocks are the scalar field and spacetime curvature tensor together with their generally covariant derivatives for the former, and the spatially covariant geometric quantities together with their spatially covariant derivatives for the later. In the case of a single scalar degree of freedom, they are transformed to each other by gauge fixing and recovering procedures, of which we give the explicit expressions. We make a systematic classification of all the scalar monomials in the spatially covariant gravity according to the total number of derivatives up to $d=4$, and their correspondence to the scalar-tensor monomials. We discusse the possibility of using spatially covariant monomials to generate ghostfree higher derivative scalar-tensor theories. We also derive the covariant 3+1 decomposition without fixing any specific coordinate, which will be useful when performing a covariant Hamiltonian analysis.
We investigate the ghostfree scalar-tensor theory with a timelike scalar field, with derivatives of the scalar field up to the third order and with the Riemann tensor up to the quadratic order. We build two types of linear spaces. One is the set of linearly independent generally covariant scalar-tensor monomials, the other is the set of linearly independent spatially covariant gravity monomials. We argue that these two types of linear space are isomorphic to each other in the sense of gauge fixing/recovering procedures. We then identify the subspaces in the spatially covariant gravity, which are spanned by linearly independent monomials built of the extrinsic and intrinsic curvature, the lapse function as well as their spatial derivatives, up to the fourth order in the total number of derivatives. The vectors in these subspaces, i.e., spatially covariant polynomials, automatically propagate at most three degrees of freedom. As a result, their images under the gauge recovering mappings are automatically the subspaces of scalar-tensor theory that propagate up to three degrees of freedom as long as the scalar field is timelike. The mappings from the spaces of spatially covariant gravity to the spaces of scalar-tensor theory are encoded in the projection matrices, of which we also derived the expressions explicitly. Our formalism and results can be useful in deriving the generally covariant higher derivative scalar-tensor theory without ghost(s).
We review the theory of alignment in Lorentzian geometry and apply it to the algebraic classification of the Weyl tensor in higher dimensions. This classification reduces to the the well-known Petrov classification of the Weyl tensor in four dimensions. We discuss the algebraic classification of a number of known higher dimensional spacetimes. There are many applications of the Weyl classification scheme, especially in conjunction with the higher dimensional frame formalism that has been developed in order to generalize the four dimensional Newman--Penrose formalism. For example, we discuss higher dimensional generalizations of the Goldberg-Sachs theorem and the Peeling theorem. We also discuss the higher dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes with vanishing scalar curvature invariants and constant scalar curvature invariants, which are of interest since they are solutions of supergravity theory.
We explore General Relativity solutions with stealth scalar hair in general quadratic higher-order scalar-tensor theories. Adopting the assumption that the scalar field has a constant kinetic term, we derive in a fully covariant manner a set of conditions under which the Euler-Lagrange equations allow General Relativity solutions as exact solutions in the presence of a general matter component minimally coupled to gravity. The scalar field possesses a nontrivial profile, which can be obtained by integrating the condition of constant kinetic term for each metric solution. We demonstrate the construction of the scalar field profile for several cases including the Kerr-Newman-de Sitter spacetime as a general black hole solution characterized by mass, charge, and angular momentum in the presence of a cosmological constant. We also show that asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes cannot support nontrivial scalar hair.
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.