A Way to Dynamically Overcome the Cosmological Constant Problem

The Cosmological Constant problem can be solved once we require that the full standard Einstein Hilbert lagrangian, gravity plus matter, is multiplied by a total derivative. We analyze such a picture writing the total derivative as the covariant gradient of a new vector field (b_mu). The dynamics of this b_mu field can play a key role in the explanation of the present cosmological acceleration of the Universe.Comment: 5 page

The regular cosmic string in Born-Infeld gravity

It is shown that Born-Infeld gravity --a high energy deformation of Einstein gravity-- removes the singularities of a cosmic string. The respective vacuum solution results to be free of conical singularity and closed timelike curves. The space ends at a minimal circle where the curvature invariants vanish; but this circle cannot be reached in a finite proper time.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to Proceedings of Spanish Relativity Meeting 2010 (ERE2010, Granada, Spain

Particle Currents in a Space-Time dependent and CP-violating Higgs Background: a Field Theory Approach

Motivated by cosmological applications like electroweak baryogenesis, we develop a field theoretic approach to the computation of particle currents on a space-time dependent and CP-violating Higgs background. We consider the Standard Model model with two Higgs doublets and CP violation in the scalar sector, and compute both fermionic and Higgs currents by means of an expansion in the background fields. We discuss the gauge dependence of the results and the renormalization of the current operators, showing that in the limit of local equilibrium, no extra renormalization conditions are needed in order to specify the system completely.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX file, uses epsf.sty. 4 figures available as a compressed .ep

Towards a Nonequilibrium Quantum Field Theory Approach to Electroweak Baryogenesis

We propose a general method to compute $CP$-violating observables from extensions of the standard model in the context of electroweak baryogenesis. It is alternative to the one recently developed by Huet and Nelson and relies on a nonequilibrium quantum field theory approach. The method is valid for all shapes and sizes of the bubble wall expanding in the thermal bath during a first-order electroweak phase transition. The quantum physics of $CP$-violation and its suppression coming from the incoherent nature of thermal processes are also made explicit.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure available upon e-mail reques

Hartree-Fock theory with a self-generated magnetic field

We prove the existence of a ground state within the Hartree-Fock theory for atoms and molecules, in the presence of self-generated magnetic fields, with and without direct spin coupling. The ground state exists provided that the total charge Z of the K nuclei exceeds N, where N is the number of electrons, and, in the spin-polarized case, provided in addition that the nuclear charge is not too high

Electroweak Evolution Equations

Enlarging a previous analysis, where only fermions and transverse gauge bosons were taken into account, we write down infrared-collinear evolution equations for the Standard Model of electroweak interactions computing the full set of splitting functions. Due to the presence of double logs which are characteristic of electroweak interactions (Bloch-Nordsieck violation), new infrared singular splitting functions have to be introduced. We also include corrections related to the third generation Yukawa couplings.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Cosmological perturbations of self-accelerating universe in nonlinear massive gravity

We study cosmological perturbations of self-accelerating universe solutions in the recently proposed nonlinear theory of massive gravity, with general matter content. While the broken diffeomorphism invariance implies that there generically are 2 tensor, 2 vector and 2 scalar degrees of freedom in the gravity sector, we find that the scalar and vector degrees have vanishing kinetic terms and nonzero mass terms. Depending on their nonlinear behavior, this indicates either nondynamical nature of these degrees or strong couplings. Assuming the former, we integrate out the 2 vector and 2 scalar degrees of freedom. We then find that in the scalar and vector sectors, gauge-invariant variables constructed from metric and matter perturbations have exactly the same quadratic action as in general relativity. The difference from general relativity arises only in the tensor sector, where the graviton mass modifies the dispersion relation of gravitational waves, with a time-dependent effective mass. This may lead to modification of stochastic gravitational wave spectrum.Comment: 32 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor update to match the published versio

Fast Gibbs sampling for high-dimensional Bayesian inversion

Solving ill-posed inverse problems by Bayesian inference has recently attracted considerable attention. Compared to deterministic approaches, the probabilistic representation of the solution by the posterior distribution can be exploited to explore and quantify its uncertainties. In applications where the inverse solution is subject to further analysis procedures, this can be a significant advantage. Alongside theoretical progress, various new computational techniques allow to sample very high dimensional posterior distributions: In [Lucka2012], a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) posterior sampler was developed for linear inverse problems with $\ell_1$-type priors. In this article, we extend this single component Gibbs-type sampler to a wide range of priors used in Bayesian inversion, such as general $\ell_p^q$ priors with additional hard constraints. Besides a fast computation of the conditional, single component densities in an explicit, parameterized form, a fast, robust and exact sampling from these one-dimensional densities is key to obtain an efficient algorithm. We demonstrate that a generalization of slice sampling can utilize their specific structure for this task and illustrate the performance of the resulting slice-within-Gibbs samplers by different computed examples. These new samplers allow us to perform sample-based Bayesian inference in high-dimensional scenarios with certain priors for the first time, including the inversion of computed tomography (CT) data with the popular isotropic total variation (TV) prior.Comment: submitted to "Inverse Problems

Determinant-Gravity: Cosmological implications

We analyze the action $\int d^4x \sqrt{\det||{\cal B} g_{\mu\nu}+ {\cal C} R_{\mu\nu}}||$ as a possible alternative or addition to the Einstein gravity. Choosing a particular form of ${\cal B}(R)= \sqrt {R}$ we can restore the Einstein gravity and, if ${\cal B}=m^2$, we obtain the cosmological constant term. Taking ${\cal B} = m^2 + {\cal B}_1 R$ and expanding the action in $1/m^2$, we obtain as a leading term the Einstein Lagrangian with a cosmological constant proportional to $m^4$ and a series of higher order operators. In general case of non-vanishing ${\cal B}$ and ${\cal C}$ new cosmological solutions for the Robertson-Walker metric are obtained.Comment: revtex format, 5 pages,8 figures,references adde

Flux vacua in DBI type Einstein-Maxwell theory

We study compactification of extra dimensions in a theory of Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) type gravity. We investigate the solution for Minkowski spacetime with an $S^2$ extra space as well as that for de Sitter spacetime ($S^4$) with an $S^2$ extra space. They are derived by the effective potential method in the presence of the magnetic flux on the extra sphere. We also consider the higher dimensional generalization of the solutions. We find that, in a certain model, the radius of the extra space has a minimum value independent of the higher-dimensional Newton constant in weak-field limit.Comment: 13 pages, no figure. A reference added, typos fixe