Narrow Results

In this paper, we work in the context of Teleparallelism Equivalent to General Relativity (TEGR) in order to construct the energy–momentum flux for Gödel-type solutions of Einstein's equations. We use an stationary observer, which is settled by the tetrad choice, to obtain the gravitational pressure for each direction of space in cartesian coordinates. Then, we write down the total pressure for each direction in terms of the pressure of the fluid, thus we are able to identify the role of the gravitational pressure.

This paper deals with gravitational thermodynamics. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are established in terms of energy density and pressure, which are defined in the scope of Teleparallelism Equivalent to General Relativity (TEGR). Such laws are applied to gravitational waves, in particular the PP-wave. A negative entropy variation for an isothermal process is obtained.

The role played by the congruence in the prediction of the gravitational energy in the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity is discussed. It is shown that some congruences yield unphysical predictions. It is also shown that the energy–momentum tensor density predicted by the proper reference frame of an arbitrary accelerated observer vanishes along the observer’s worldline, regardless of its acceleration. The latter result is discussed and arguments both against and in favor of the use of this type of frame to describe the gravitational energy are presented; arguments against the belief that the principle of equivalence is incompatible with the localization of the gravitational energy are also presented. A gauge condition is applied to the teleparallel frame and its consistence is discussed: using three different tetrads for the pp-wave spacetimes, it is shown that the most consistent prediction comes from the tetrad that satisfies this gauge. The possibility of having a well-defined concept of absolute vacuum is also discussed.

This paper deals with the thermodynamics of gravitational radiation arising from the Bondi-Sachs space-time. The equation of state found allows us to conclude that the dependence of the energy density on the temperature is a quadratic power of the latter. Such a conclusion is possible once the consequences of the first law of thermodynamics are analyzed. Then, in analogy to electromagnetic radiation, the same approach used by Planck to obtain the quantum of energy of the gravitational radiation is proposed. An energy for the graviton proportional to the cubic frequency is found. The graviton is here understood as the quantum of gravitational energy.

We compare metric theories to theories with teleparallelism and affine theories of gravity in order to discuss perspectives in the canonical quantization of gravity opened by a realization of Mach's principle.

The teleparallel equivalent of general relativity (TEGR) is an alternative formulation of Einstein's equations in the framework of Riemann-Cartan spacetimes. The gravitational field can be described either by the curvature of the torsion-free connection of general relativity (GR) or by the torsion of the curvature-free connection of the TEGR. Both in GR and TEGR the freedom in the choice of coordinates gives rise to the equivalence problem of deciding whether two solutions of the field equations are the same. This problem is solved by means of a invariant description of the gravitational field. We investigate whether the equivalence between GR and TEGR also holds at the level of these invariant descriptions. We show that the GR description assures equivalence in TEGR only in very special situations. These results are illustrated on teleparallel spacetimes with torsion and Gödel metric.

Born-Infeld deformation strategy to smooth theories having divergent solutions is applied to the teleparallel equivalent of General Relativity. The equivalence between teleparallelism and General Relativity is exploited to obtain a deformed theory of gravity based on second order differential equations, since teleparallel Lagrangian is built just from first derivatives of the vierbein. We show that Born-Infeld teleparallelism cures the initial singularity in a spatially flat FRW universe; moreover, it provides a natural inflationary stage without resorting to an inflaton field. The Born-Infeld parameter λ bounds the dynamics of Hubble parameter H(t) and establishes a maximum attainable spacetime curvature.

In the present investigation, we show that there exists a close analogy of geometry of space–time in general relativity (GR) with a structure of defects in a crystal. We present the relation between the Kleinert's model of a crystal with defects and Plebanski's theory of gravity. We have considered the translational defects — dislocations and the rotational defects — disclinations — in the three- and four-dimensional crystals. The four-dimensional crystalline defects present the Riemann–Cartan space–time which has an additional geometric property — "torsion" — connected with dislocations. The world crystal is a model for the gravitation which has a new type of gauge symmetry: the Einstein's gravitation has a zero torsion as a special gauge, while a zero connection is another equivalent gauge with nonzero torsion which corresponds to the Einstein's theory of "teleparallelism". Any intermediate choice of the gauge with nonzero connection is also allowed. In the present investigation, we show that in the Plebanski formulation the phase of gravity with torsion is equivalent to the ordinary or topological gravity, and we can exclude a torsion as a separate dynamical variable.

By generalizing the Hodge dual operator to the case of soldered bundles, and working in the context of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity, an analysis of the duality symmetry in gravitation is performed. Although the basic conclusion is that, at least in the general case, gravitation is not dual symmetric, there is a particular theory in which this symmetry shows up. It is a self dual (or anti-self dual) teleparallel gravity in which, due to the fact that it does not contribute to the interaction of fermions with gravitation, the purely tensor part of torsion is assumed to vanish. The ensuing fermionic gravitational interaction is found to be chiral. Since duality is intimately related to renormalizability, this theory may eventually be more amenable to renormalization than teleparallel gravity or general relativity.

We investigate the gravitational radiation produced by a linearly accelerated source in general relativity. The investigation is performed by studying the vacuum C metric, which is interpreted as representing the exterior space–time of an uniformly accelerating spherically symmetric gravitational source, and is carried out in the context of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. For an observer sufficiently far from both the (modified) Schwarzschild and Rindler horizons, which is a realistic situation, we obtain a simple expression for the total emitted gravitational radiation. We also briefly discuss on the absolute or relative character of the accelerated motion.

The assumption that matter charges and currents could generate fields, which are called, in analogy with electromagnetism, gravitoeletric and gravitomagnetic fields, dating from the origins of General Relativity (GR). On the other hand, the Teleparallel Equivalent of GR (TEGR), as a gauge theory, seems to be the ideal scenario to define these fields, based on the gauge field strength components. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the nature of the gravitational electric and magnetic fields in the context of the TEGR, where the tetrad formalism on which it is based seems more suited to deal with phenomena related to observers. As its applications, we have studied the gravito-electromagnetic fields for the Schwarzschild solution and for the geometry produced by a spherical rotating shell in slow motion and weak field regime. The expressions obtained, at the linear regime, are very similar to those of electromagnetism.

We present a method to calculate the gravitational energy when asymptotic boundary conditions for the space–time are not given. This is the situation for most of the cosmological models. The expression for the gravitational energy is obtained in the context of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. We apply our method first to the Schwarzschild–de Sitter solution of Einstein's equation, and then to the Robertson–Walker universe. We show that in the first case our method leads to an average energy density of the vacuum space–time, and in the latter case the energy vanishes in the case of null curvature.

In the last dozen years, a wide and variegated mass of observational data revealed that the universe is now expanding at an accelerated rate. In the absence of a well-based theory to interpret the observations, cosmography provides information about the evolution of the universe from measured distances, only assuming that the geometry can be described by the Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker metric. In this paper, we perform a high-redshift analysis which allows us to put constraints on the cosmographic parameters up to the fifth-order, thus inducing indirect constraints on any gravity theory. Here, we are interested in the so-called teleparallel gravity theory, $f(T)$. Actually, we use the analytical expressions of the present day values of $f(T)$ and its derivatives as functions of the cosmographic parameters to map the cosmography region of confidences into confidence ranges for $f(T)$ and its derivative. Moreover, we show how these can be used to test some teleparallel gravity models without solving the dynamical equations. Our analysis is based on the Union2 Type Ia supernovae (SNIa) data set, a set of 28 measurements of the Hubble parameter, the Hubble diagram constructed from some gamma ray bursts (GRB) luminosity distance indicators and Gaussian priors on the distance from the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) and the Hubble constant $h$. To perform our statistical analysis and to explore the probability distributions of the cosmographic parameters, we use the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method.

In 1922, Kottler put forward the program to remove the gravitational potential, the metric of spacetime, from the fundamental equations in physics as far as possible. He successfully applied this idea to Newton’s gravitostatics and to Maxwell’s electrodynamics, where Kottler recast the field equations in premetric form and specified a metric-dependent constitutive law. We will discuss the basics of the premetric approach and some of its beautiful consequences, like the division of universal constants into two classes. We show that classical electrodynamics can be developed without a metric quite straightforwardly: the Maxwell equations, together with a local and linear response law for electromagnetic media, admit a consistent premetric formulation. Kottler’s program succeeds here without provisos. In Kottler’s approach to gravity, making the theory relativistic, two premetric quasi-Maxwellian field equations arise, but their field variables, if interpreted in terms of general relativity, do depend on the metric. However, one can hope to bring the Kottler idea to work by using the teleparallelism equivalent of general relativity, where the gravitational potential, the coframe, can be chosen in a premetric way.

We propose a codimension two warped braneworld model within the teleparallel $f(T)$ gravity. Asymptotically, the bulk geometry converges to an $Ad{S}_6$ spacetime whose cosmological constant is produced by the torsion parameters. Furthermore, the torsion induces an AdS-dS transition on the exterior region. As the torsion parameters vary, the brane undergoes a phase transition from a thick string-like brane into ring-like structures. The bulk-brane Planck mass ration is modified by the torsion. The analysis of the stress–energy condition reveals a splitting brane process satisfying the weak and strong–energy conditions for some values of the parameters. In addition, we investigate the behavior of the gravitational perturbations in this scenario. It turns out that the gravitational spectrum has a linear behavior for small masses and is independent of the torsion parameters for large masses. In the bulk, the torsion keeps a gapless nonlocalizable and stable tower of massive modes. Inside the brane core, the torsion produces new barriers and potential wells leading to small amplitude massive modes and a massless mode localized around the ring structures.

This paper looks at how changes of coordinates on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold induce homogeneous linear transformations on its tangent spaces. We see that a pseudo-orthonormal frame in a given tangent space is the basis for a set of Riemann normal coordinates. A Lorentz subgroup of the general linear transformations preserves this pseudo-orthonormality. We borrow techniques from the methodology of non-linear realizations to analyze this group-subgroup structure. “Parallel maps” are used to relate tangent space at different points. “Parallelisms” across a finite region of the manifold may be built up from them. These are used to define Weitzenböck connections and Levi-Civita connections. This provides a new formulation of teleparallel gravity, in which the tetrad field is viewed as a field-valued group element relating the coordinate basis to the frame basis used in defining a parallelism. This formulation separates the metric degrees of freedom from those associated with the choice of parallelism. The group element can be combined by matrix multiplication with Lorentz transformations of frame or with other Jacobian matrices. We show how this facilitates a new understanding of inertial forces and local Lorentz transformations. The analysis is also applied to translations of the coordinates. If they are constant across spacetime, this has no effect on the tangent space bases. If the translation parameters become fields, they induce general linear transformations of the coordinate basis; however, the tetrad components can only be expressed in terms of translations on a flat spacetime.

The issue of encoding physical information into metric structure of physical theories has been discussed recently by the author in the case of black hole teleparallelism. In this paper, one obtains a teleparallel chiral currents from quantum anomalies and topological torsional invariants of Nieh-Yan type. The Pontryagin index is also obtained in the case of rotating Kerr spacetime metric of non-static black holes. Magnetic monopoles which appears in this approach can be eliminated by a torsion constraint. These ideas are applied to Kerr and Kerr–Newmann charged black holes.

We analyze the conservation laws in the gauge gravity theory which are derived for the general class of gravitational models with the action invariant under the local Poincaré and the diffeomorphism group. The consistent Noether-Lagrange formalism is developed, revealing the important role of the auxiliary Goldstone and Stueckelberg fields, with the help of which we construct the composite gauge fields that have a clear geometrical and physical meaning.

Recently, presence of gravitational and axial anomalies in Riemann–Cartan (RC) spacetime [Garcia de Andrade, Class. Quantum Gravity 38 (2021)] indicates that topological densities expressed in terms of torsion may be very useful in understanding the physics involved. Pontryagin and Euler density may be presented in terms of torsion in teleparallelism. In this paper, computation of these topological torsional densities in Kerr black holes is given. The geometric quantisation of torsion is also discussed in terms of the teleparallel metric. Actually, the recent work of Del Grosso and Poplawski [arXiv: 2107.06112] showed that the torsion quantization appears when torsion is the generator of momentum quantum mechanical commutator. Moreover, Poplawski et al. showed that use of quantum torsion in quantum electrodynamic (QED) may avoid the divergences in Feynmann integrals, process called, a torsion regularization. Here, we compute the momenta components in terms of teleparallel Kerr black hole torsion generator, like a Casimir tensor. The quantum generator, while not yet related by torsion, is seen to be naturally associated to axial torsion skew-symmetric in the teleparallel geometry. An important fact is that from torsion quantization, torsion chirality appears naturally in the Einstein–Cartan spin-torsion analogy, where now spin-angular momentum of the black hole is connected to torsion. Torsional chiral anomalies are shown to diverge at black hole singularity, and then they cannot be canceled at singularity.

The vierbein (tetrad) fields for closed and open Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies are hard to work out in most of the theories featuring absolute parallelism. The difficulty is traced in the fact that these theories are not invariant under local Lorentz transformations of the vierbein. We illustrate this issue in the framework of f(T) theories and Born-Infeld determinantal gravity. In particular, we show that the early Universe as described by the Born-Infeld scheme is singularity free and naturally inflationary as a consequence of the very nature of Born-Infeld gravitational action.