Three-magnetic fields

A completely new mechanism to generate the observed amount of large-scale cosmological magnetic fields is introduced in the context of three-form inflation. The amplification of the fields occurs via fourth order dynamics of the vector perturbations and avoids the backreaction problem that plagues most previously introduced mechanisms.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures -- v2 as published (title changed in the published version to "Cosmic magnetization in three-form inflation"

Doubly-boosted vector cosmologies from disformal metrics

A systematic dynamical system approach is applied to study the cosmology of anisotropic Bianchi I universes in which a vector field is assumed to operate on a disformal frame. This study yields a number of new fixed points, among which anisotropic scaling solutions. Within the simplifying assumption of (nearly) constant-slope potentials these are either not stable attractors, do not describe accelerating expansion or else they feature too large anisotropies to be compatible with observations. Nonetheless, some solutions do have an appeal for cosmological applications in that isotropy is retained due to rapid oscillations of the vector field.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, prepared during the NORDITA Extended Theories of Gravity program. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1407.344

Instabilities in tensorial nonlocal gravity

We discuss the cosmological implications of nonlocal modifications of general relativity containing tensorial structures. Assuming the presence of standard radiation- and matter-dominated eras, we show that, except in very particular cases, the nonlocal terms contribute a rapidly growing energy density. These models therefore generically do not have a stable cosmological evolution.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. v2: version published in PR

Unifying Einstein and Palatini gravities

We consider a novel class of $f(\R)$ gravity theories where the connection is related to the conformally scaled metric $\hat g_{\mu\nu}=C(\R)g_{\mu\nu}$ with a scaling that depends on the scalar curvature $\R$ only. We call them C-theories and show that the Einstein and Palatini gravities can be obtained as special limits. In addition, C-theories include completely new physically distinct gravity theories even when $f(\R)=\R$. With nonlinear $f(\R)$, C-theories interpolate and extrapolate the Einstein and Palatini cases and may avoid some of their conceptual and observational problems. We further show that C-theories have a scalar-tensor formulation, which in some special cases reduces to simple Brans-Dicke-type gravity. If matter fields couple to the connection, the conservation laws in C-theories are modified. The stability of perturbations about flat space is determined by a simple condition on the lagrangian.Comment: 17 pages, no figure

Spin polarization in a T-shape conductor induced by strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling

We investigate numerically the spin polarization of the current in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction in a T-shaped conductor proposed by A.A. Kiselev and K.W. Kim (Appl. Phys. Lett. {\bf 78} 775 (2001)). The recursive Green function method is used to calculate the three terminal spin dependent transmission probabilities. We focus on single-channel transport and show that the spin polarization becomes nearly 100 % with a conductance close to $e^{2}/h$ for sufficiently strong spin-orbit coupling. This is interpreted by the fact that electrons with opposite spin states are deflected into an opposite terminal by the spin dependent Lorentz force. The influence of the disorder on the predicted effect is also discussed. Cases for multi-channel transport are studied in connection with experiments