We show that Liouville gravity arises as the limit of pure Einstein gravity in 2+epsilon dimensions as epsilon goes to zero, provided Newtons constant scales with epsilon. Our procedure - spherical reduction, dualization, limit, dualizing back - pass
es several consistency tests: geometric properties, interactions with matter and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy are as expected from Einstein gravity.
We follow an old suggestion made by Stueckelberg that there exists an intimate connection between weak interaction and gravity, symbolized by the relationship between the Fermi and Newtonrq s constants. We analyze the hypothesis that the effect of ma
tter upon the metric that represents gravitational interaction in General Relativity is an effective one. This leads us to consider gravitation to be the result of the interaction of two neutral spinorial fields (G-neutrinos) $ Psi_{g}$ and $ Omega_{g}$ with all kinds of matter and energy. We present three examples with only one G-neutrino: two static and spherically symmetric configurations and a cosmological framework for an isotropic dynamical universe. Without self-interaction, the associated effective geometry is precisely the Schwarzschild metric. On the other hand, a self-interacting G-neutrino generates a new gravitational black-hole.
We consider a subclass of Horndeski theories for studying cosmic inflation. In particular, we investigate models of inflation in which the derivative self-interaction of the scalar field and the non-minimal derivative coupling to gravity are present
in the action and equally important during inflation. In order to control contributions of each term as well as to approach the single-term limit, we introduce a special relation between the derivative interaction and the coupling to gravity. By calculating observable quantities including the power spectra and spectral tilts of scalar and tensor perturbation modes, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio, we found that the tensor-to-scalar ratio is suppressed by a factor of $(1+1/gamma)$, where $gamma$ reflects the strength of the derivative self-interaction of the inflaton field with respect to the derivative coupling gravity. We placed observational constraints on the chaotic and natural inflation models and showed that the models are consistent with the current observational data mainly due to the suppressed tensor-to-scalar ratio.
We consider a static self-gravitating system consisting of perfect fluid with isometries of an $(n-2)$-dimensional maximally symmetric space in Lovelock gravity theory. A straightforward analysis of the time-time component of the equations of motion
suggests a generalized mass function. Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff like equation is obtained by using this mass function and gravitational equations. We investigate the maximum entropy principle in Lovelock gravity, and find that this Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation can also be deduced from the so called maximum entropy principle which is originally customized for Einstein gravity theory. This investigation manifests a deep connection between gravity and thermodynamics in this generalized gravity theory.
The main goal of the present work is to analyze the cosmological scenario of the induced gravity theory developed in previous works. Such a theory consists on a Yang-Mills theory in a four-dimensional Euclidian spacetime with $SO(m,n)$ such that $m+n
=5$ and $min{0,1,2}$ as its gauge group. This theory undergoes a dynamical gauge symmetry breaking via an Inonu-Wigner contraction in its infrared sector. As a consequence, the $SO(m,n)$ algebra is deformed into a Lorentz algebra with the emergency of the local Lorentz symmetries and the gauge fields being identified with a vierbein and a spin connection. As a result, gravity is described as an effective Einstein-Cartan-like theory with ultraviolet correction terms and a propagating torsion field. We show that the cosmological model associated with this effective theory has three different regimes. In particular, the high curvature regime presents a de Sitter phase which tends towards a $Lambda$CDM model. We argue that $SO(m,n)$ induced gravities are promising effective theories to describe the early phase of the universe.