Irregular universe in the Nieh-Yan modified teleparallel gravity

The Nieh-Yan modified teleparallel gravity is a model which modifies the general relativity equivalent teleparallel gravity by a coupling between the Nieh-Yan density and an axion-like field. This model predicts parity violations in the gravitational waves if the axion-like field has a non-trivial background, and more importantly it is ghost free and avoids the pathologies presented in other parity-violating gravity models. The cosmological dynamics and perturbations of the Nieh-Yan modified teleparallel gravity have been investigated in detail, but all these previous investigations rely on the symmetry requirement that in the background universe both the metric and affine connection are homogeneous and isotropic. In this paper we relax the symmetry constraint on the connection and leave it arbitrary at the beginning, after all the cosmological principle only needs the metric of the background spacetime to meet the symmetry requirement. We find a new flat universe solution for the Nieh-Yan modified teleparallel gravity, for which the background dynamics itself is unchanged but the perturbations around it present a new feature that the scalar and tensor perturbations are coupled together at the linear level. The implications of this peculiar feature in primordial perturbations from inflation are also discussed.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figures, irregular universe, teleparallel gravit

Computing a Basis for an Integer Lattice

The extended gcd problem takes as input two integers, and asks as output an integer linear combination of the integers that are equal to their gcd. The classical extended Euclidean algorithm and fast variants such as the half-gcd algorithm give efficient algorithmic solutions. In this thesis, we give a fast algorithm to solve the simplest — but not trivial — extension of the scalar extended gcd problem on two integers to the case of integer input matrices. Given a full column rank (n + 1) × n integer matrix A, we present an algorithm that produces a square nonsingular integer matrix B such that the lattice generated by the rows of B — the set of all integer linear combinations of the rows of B — is equal to the lattice generated by the rows of A. The magnitude of entries in the basis B are guaranteed to be not much larger than those of the input matrix A. The cost of our algorithm to produce B is about the same as that required to multiply together two square integer matrices of dimension n and with the size of entries about that of the input matrix. This running time bound improves by about a factor of n on the fastest previously known algorithm