All the solutions of the form M2(warped)x\Sigma(d-2) for Lovelock gravity in vacuum in the Chern-Simons case

In this note we classify a certain family of solutions of Lovelock gravity in the Chern-Simons (CS) case, in arbitrary (odd) dimension greater than four. The spacetime is characterized by admitting a metric that is a warped product of a two-dimensional spacetime M2 and an (a priori) arbitrary Euclidean base manifold Sigma(d-2) of dimension d-2. We show that the solutions are naturally classified in terms of the equations that restrict the base manifold. According to the strength of such constraints we found the following branches in which Sigma(d-2) has to fulfill: a Lovelock equation with a single vacuum (Euclidean Lovelock Chern-Simons in dimension d-2), a single scalar equation that is the trace of an Euclidean Lovelock CS equation in dimension d-2, or finally a degenerate case in which the base manifold is not restricted at all. We show that all the cases have some degeneracy in the sense that the metric functions are not completely fixed by the field equations. This result extends the static five-dimensional case previously discussed in Phys.Rev. D76 (2007) 064038, and it shows that in the CS case, the inclusion of higher powers in the curvature does not introduce new branches of solutions in Lovelock gravity. Finally we comment on how the inclusion of a non-vanishing torsion and matter fields may modify this analysis.Comment: 15 pages, no figure

Topological self-dual vacua of deformed gauge theories

We propose a deformation principle of gauge theories in three dimensions that can describe topologically stable self-dual gauge fields, i.e., vacua configurations that in spite of their masses do not deform the background geometry and are locally undetected by charged particles. We interpret these systems as describing boundary degrees of freedom of a self-dual Yang-Mills field in $2+2$ dimensions with mixed boundary conditions. Some of these fields correspond to Abrikosov-like vortices with an exponential damping in the direction penetrating into the bulk. We also propose generalizations of these ideas to higher dimensions and arbitrary p-form gauge connections.Comment: 18 page

Four-dimensional Traversable Wormholes and Bouncing Cosmologies in Vacuum

In this letter we point out the existence of solutions to General Relativity with a negative cosmological constant in four dimensions, which contain solitons as well as traversable wormholes. The latter connect two asymptotically locally AdS$_{4}$ spacetimes. At every constant value of the radial coordinate the spacetime is a spacelike warped AdS$_{3}$. We compute the dual energy momentum tensor at each boundary showing that it yields different results. We also show that these vacuum wormholes can have more than one throat and that they are indeed traversable by computing the time it takes for a light signal to go from one boundary to the other, as seen by a geodesic observer. We generalize the wormholes to include rotation and charge. When the cosmological constant is positive we find a cosmology that is everywhere regular, has either one or two bounces and that for late and early times matches the Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker metric with spherical topology.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Birkhoff's Theorem in Higher Derivative Theories of Gravity

In this paper we present a class of higher derivative theories of gravity which admit Birkhoff's theorem. In particular, we explicitly show that in this class of theories, although generically the field equations are of fourth order, under spherical (plane or hyperbolic) symmetry, all the field equations reduce to second order and have exactly the same or similar structure to those of Lovelock theories, depending on the spacetime dimensions and the order of the Lagrangian.Comment: 7 pages, no figures. v1: This version received an Honorable Mention from the Gravity Research Foundation - 2011 Awards for Essays on Gravitation. v2: Expanded version. To appear in CQ

Hairy Black Hole Stability in AdS, Quantum Mechanics on the Half-Line and Holography

We consider the linear stability of $4$-dimensional hairy black holes with mixed boundary conditions in Anti-de Sitter spacetime. We focus on the mass of scalar fields around the maximally supersymmetric vacuum of the gauged $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity in four dimensions, $m^{2}=-2l^{-2}$. It is shown that the Schr\"{o}dinger operator on the half-line, governing the $S^{2}$, $H^{2}$ or $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ invariant mode around the hairy black hole, allows for non-trivial self-adjoint extensions and each of them correspons to a class of mixed boundary conditions in the gravitational theory. Discarding the self-adjoint extensions with a negative mode impose a restriction on these boundary conditions. The restriction is given in terms of an integral of the potential in the Schr\"{o}dinger operator resembling the estimate of Simon for Schr\"{o}dinger operators on the real line. In the context of AdS/CFT duality, our result has a natural interpretation in terms of the field theory dual effective potential.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, references added, matches published versio