587 research outputs found
Gravitational Waves from Coalescing Binary Sources
Coalescing binary systems (eg pulsars, neutron stars and black holes) are the
most likely sources of gravitational radiation, yet to be detected on or near
Earth, where the local gravitational field is negligible and the Poincar\'e
symmetry rules. On the other hand, the general theory of gravitational waves
emitted by axially symmetric rotating sources predicts the existence of a
non-vanishing news function. The existence of such function implies that, for a
distant observer, the asymptotic group of isometries, the BMS group, has a
translational symmetry that depends on the orbit periodicity of the source,
thus breaking the isotropy o the Poincar\'e translations. These results suggest
the application of the asymptotic BMS-covariant wave equation to obtain a
proper theoretical basis for the gravitational waves observations.Comment: 4 pages, awarded a honorable mention from the Gravity Research
Foundation 201
Chronology Protection in Galileon Models and Massive Gravity
Galileon models are a class of effective field theories that have recently
received much attention. They arise in the decoupling limit of theories of
massive gravity, and in some cases they have been treated in their own right as
scalar field theories with a specific nonlinearly realized global symmetry
(Galilean transformation). It is well known that in the presence of a source,
these Galileon theories admit superluminal propagating solutions, implying that
as quantum field theories they must admit a different notion of causality than
standard local Lorentz invariant theories. We show that in these theories it is
easy to construct closed timelike curves (CTCs) within the {\it naive} regime
of validity of the effective field theory. However, on closer inspection we see
that the CTCs could never arise since the Galileon inevitably becomes
infinitely strongly coupled at the onset of the formation of a CTC. This
implies an infinite amount of backreaction, first on the background for the
Galileon field, signaling the break down of the effective field theory, and
subsequently on the spacetime geometry, forbidding the formation of the CTC.
Furthermore the background solution required to create CTCs becomes unstable
with an arbitrarily fast decay time. Thus Galileon theories satisfy a direct
analogue of Hawking's chronology protection conjecture.Comment: 34 pages, no figure
Note About Hamiltonian Structure of Non-Linear Massive Gravity
We perform the Hamiltonian analysis of non-linear massive gravity action
studied recently in arXiv:1106.3344 [hep-th]. We show that the Hamiltonian
constraint is the second class constraint. As a result the theory possesses an
odd number of the second class constraints and hence all non physical degrees
of freedom cannot be eliminated.Comment: 15 page
An Analytical Construction of the SRB Measures for Baker-type Maps
For a class of dynamical systems, called the axiom-A systems, Sinai, Ruelle
and Bowen showed the existence of an invariant measure (SRB measure) weakly
attracting the temporal average of any initial distribution that is absolutely
continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure. Recently, the SRB measures
were found to be related to the nonequilibrium stationary state distribution
functions for thermostated or open systems. Inspite of the importance of these
SRB measures, it is difficult to handle them analytically because they are
often singular functions. In this article, for three kinds of Baker-type maps,
the SRB measures are analytically constructed with the aid of a functional
equation, which was proposed by de Rham in order to deal with a class of
singular functions. We first briefly review the properties of singular
functions including those of de Rham. Then, the Baker-type maps are described,
one of which is non-conservative but time reversible, the second has a
Cantor-like invariant set, and the third is a model of a simple chemical
reaction . For the second example, the
cases with and without escape are considered. For the last example, we consider
the reaction processes in a closed system and in an open system under a flux
boundary condition. In all cases, we show that the evolution equation of the
distribution functions partially integrated over the unstable direction is very
similar to de Rham's functional equation and, employing this analogy, we
explicitly construct the SRB measures.Comment: 53 pages, 10 figures, to appear in CHAO
The Self-Accelerating Universe with Vectors in Massive Gravity
We explore the possibility of realising self-accelerated expansion of the
Universe taking into account the vector components of a massive graviton. The
effective action in the decoupling limit contains an infinite number of terms,
once the vector degrees of freedom are included. These can be re-summed in
physically interesting situations, which result in non-polynomial couplings
between the scalar and vector modes. We show there are self-accelerating
background solutions for this effective action, with the possibility of having
a non-trivial profile for the vector fields. We then study fluctuations around
these solutions and show that there is always a ghost, if a background vector
field is present. When the background vector field is switched off, the ghost
can be avoided, at the price of entering into a strong coupling regime, in
which the vector fluctuations have vanishing kinetic terms. Finally we show
that the inclusion of a bare cosmological constant does not change the previous
conclusions and it does not lead to a ghost mode in the absence of a background
vector field.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure
On Non-Linear Actions for Massive Gravity
In this work we present a systematic construction of the potentially
ghost-free non-linear massive gravity actions. The most general action can be
regarded as a 2-parameter deformation of a minimal massive action. Further
extensions vanish in 4 dimensions. The general mass term is constructed in
terms of a "deformed" determinant from which this property can clearly be seen.
In addition, our formulation identifies non-dynamical terms that appear in
previous constructions and which do not contribute to the equations of motion.
We elaborate on the formal structure of these theories as well as some of their
implications.Comment: v3: 22 pages, minor comments added, version to appear in JHE
Codimension Two Branes and Distributional Curvature
In general relativity, there is a well-developed formalism for working with
the approximation that a gravitational source is concentrated on a shell, or
codimension one surface. By contrast, there are obstacles to concentrating
sources on surfaces that have a higher codimension, for example, a string in a
spacetime with dimension greater than or equal to four. Here it is shown that,
by giving up some of the generality of the codimension one case, curvature can
be concentrated on submanifolds that have codimension two. A class of metrics
is identified such that (1) the scalar curvature and Ricci densities exist as
distributions with support on a co-dimension two submanifold, and (2) using the
Einstein equation, the distributional curvature corresponds to a concentrated
stress-energy with equation of state p equals minus the energy density, where p
is the isotropic pressure tangent to the submanifold. This is the appropriate
stress-energy to describe a self-gravitating brane that is governed by an area
action, or a brane world deSitter cosmology. The possibility of having a
different equation of state arise from a wider class of metrics is discussed.Comment: 18 pages; v2 references added; typos corrected, references added;
additional references adde
Interacting spin-2 fields in three dimensions
Using the frame formulation of multi-gravity in three dimensions, we show
that demanding the presence of secondary constraints which remove the
Boulware-Deser ghosts restricts the possible interaction terms of the theory
and identifies invertible frame field combinations whose effective metric may
consistently couple to matter. The resulting ghost-free theories can be
represented by theory graphs which are trees. In the case of three frame
fields, we explicitly show that the requirement of positive masses and energies
for the bulk spin-2 modes in AdS is consistent with a positive central
charge for the putative dual CFT.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, v2: minor changes, matches published versio
Accelerated expansion from ghost-free bigravity: a statistical analysis with improved generality
We study the background cosmology of the ghost-free, bimetric theory of
gravity. We perform an extensive statistical analysis of the model using both
frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and employ the constraints on the expansion
history of the Universe from the observations of supernovae, the cosmic
microwave background and the large scale structure to estimate the model's
parameters and test the goodness of the fits. We explore the parameter space of
the model with nested sampling to find the best-fit chi-square, obtain the
Bayesian evidence, and compute the marginalized posteriors and mean
likelihoods. We mainly focus on a class of sub-models with no explicit
cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) term to assess the ability of the
theory to dynamically cause a late-time accelerated expansion. The model
behaves as standard gravity without a cosmological constant at early times,
with an emergent extra contribution to the energy density that converges to a
cosmological constant in the far future. The model can in most cases yield very
good fits and is in perfect agreement with the data. This is because many
points in the parameter space of the model exist that give rise to
time-evolution equations that are effectively very similar to those of the
CDM. This similarity makes the model compatible with observations as
in the CDM case, at least at the background level. Even though our
results indicate a slightly better fit for the CDM concordance model
in terms of the -value and evidence, none of the models is statistically
preferred to the other. However, the parameters of the bigravity model are in
general degenerate. A similar but perturbative analysis of the model as well as
more data will be required to break the degeneracies and constrain the
parameters, in case the model will still be viable compared to the
CDM.Comment: 42 pages, 9 figures; typos corrected in equations (2.12), (2.13),
(3.7), (3.8) and (3.9); more discussions added (footnotes 5, 8, 10 and 13)
and abstract, sections 4.2, 4.3 and 5 (conclusions) modified in response to
referee's comments; references added; acknowledgements modified; all results
completely unchanged; matches version accepted for publication in JHE
Nonlinear Dynamics of 3D Massive Gravity
We explore the nonlinear classical dynamics of the three-dimensional theory
of "New Massive Gravity" proposed by Bergshoeff, Hohm and Townsend. We find
that the theory passes remarkably highly nontrivial consistency checks at the
nonlinear level. In particular, we show that: (1) In the decoupling limit of
the theory, the interactions of the helicity-0 mode are described by a single
cubic term -- the so-called cubic Galileon -- previously found in the context
of the DGP model and in certain 4D massive gravities. (2) The conformal mode of
the metric coincides with the helicity-0 mode in the decoupling limit. Away
from this limit the nonlinear dynamics of the former is described by a certain
generalization of Galileon interactions, which like the Galileons themselves
have a well-posed Cauchy problem. (3) We give a non-perturbative argument based
on the presence of additional symmetries that the full theory does not lead to
any extra degrees of freedom, suggesting that a 3D analog of the 4D
Boulware-Deser ghost is not present in this theory. Last but not least, we
generalize "New Massive Gravity" and construct a class of 3D cubic order
massive models that retain the above properties.Comment: 21 page
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