Asymptotically nonlocal gravity

Nonlinear quantum mechanics at the Planck scale can produce nonlocal effects contributing to resolution of singularities, to cosmic acceleration, and modified black-hole dynamics, while avoiding the usual causality issues.

The experimental results that test Bell's inequality have found strong evidence suggesting that there are nonlocal aspects in nature. Evidently, these nonlocal effects, which concern spacelike separated regions, create an enormous tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics. In addition, by avoiding the coincidence limit, semiclassical gravity can also accommodate nonlocal aspects. Motivated by these results, we study if it is possible to construct geometrical th...

In Einstein's theory of general relativity the vacuum solution yields a blackhole with a curvature singularity, where there exists a point-like source with a Dirac delta distribution which is introduced as a boundary condition in the static case. It has been known for a while that ghost-free infinite derivative theory of gravity can ameliorate such a singularity at least at the level of linear perturbation around the Minkowski background. In this paper, we will show that the ...

We study the gravitational field of static p-branes in D-dimensional Minkowski space in the framework of linearized ghost-free (GF) gravity. The concrete models of GF gravity we consider are parametrized by the non-local form factors $\exp(-\Box/\mu^2)$ and $\exp(\Box^2/\mu^4)$, where $\mu^{-1}$ is the scale of non-locality. We show that the singular behavior of the gravitational field of p-branes in General Relativity is cured by short-range modifications introduced by the n...

We compute scaling solutions of functional flow equations for quantum gravity in a general truncation with up to four derivatives of the metric. They connect the asymptotically free ultraviolet fixed point, which is accessible to perturbation theory, to the non-perturbative infrared region. The existence of such scaling solutions is necessary for a renormalizable quantum field theory of gravity. If the proposed scaling solution is confirmed beyond our approximations asymptoti...

The study of the gravitational field produced by a spatially non-local, superposed quantum state of a massive particle is a thrilling area of modern physics. One question to be answered is whether the gravitational field behaves as the classical superposition of two particles separated by a spatial distance with half the mass located at each position or as a quantum superposition with a far more interesting and subtle behaviour for the gravitational field. Quantum field theor...

Asymptotic safety is a set of conditions, based on the existence of a nontrivial fixed point for the renormalization group flow, which would make a quantum field theory consistent up to arbitrarily high energies. After introducing the basic ideas of this approach, I review the present evidence in favor of an asymptotically safe quantum field theory of gravity.

Quantum corrections to the classical field equations, induced by a scale dependent gravitational constant, are analyzed in the case of the static isotropic metric. The requirement of general covariance for the resulting non-local effective field equations puts severe restrictions on the nature of the solutions that can be obtained. In general the existence of vacuum solutions to the effective field equations restricts the value of the gravitational scaling exponent $\nu^{-1}$...

We investigate gravitational radiation in the linear approximation within the framework of the recent nonlocal generalization of Einstein's theory of gravitation. In this theory, nonlocality can simulate dark matter; in fact, in the Newtonian regime, we recover the phenomenological Tohline-Kuhn approach to modified gravity. To account for the observational data regarding the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, nonlocality is associated with a characteristic length scale of or...

n-Dimensional pure gravity theory can be obtained as the effective theory of an n+1 model (with non-compact extra dimension) where general n+1 reparametrization invariance is explicitly broken in the extra dimension. As was pointed out in the literature, a necessary consistency condition for having a non-vanishing four dimensional Newton constant is the normalizability in the extra dimension of the zero mass graviton. This, in turn, implies that gravity localization is produc...