Dr. Angel Murcia

National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), Padova Section

Higher-order gravities: What they are and what they are for

Wednesday, December 21, 2022, 10:00 a.m. Classroom, Departmental Ed. II

In this talk I will introduce a class of gravitational theories that receive the name of higher-order gravities. They generalize Einstein's General Relativity (GR) by introducing in the classical action terms which are of higher-order in the curvature (for instance, a Ricci-scalar squared term). Apart from being invariant under arbitrary changes of coordinates (as GR), these theories could be understood as effective descriptions of potential theories of Quantum Gravity in regimes of energies which are above the GR validity limit, but still way below the energy range in which a full quantum description is required. Having said this, I will provide some examples of higher-order gravities, study the possibility of adding couplings to electromagnetism and, in this latter case, explore some astonishing properties and possibilities that special subsets of higher-order gravities offer us.