A century ago, Einstein formulated his elegant and elaborate theory of General Relativity, which has so far withstood a multitude of empirical tests with remarkable success. Notwithstanding the ...triumphs of Einstein’s theory, the tenacious challenges of modern cosmology and of particle physics have motivated the exploration of further generalised theories of space–time. Even though Einstein’s interpretation of gravity in terms of the curvature of space–time is commonly adopted, the assignment of geometrical concepts to gravity is ambiguous because General Relativity allows three entirely different, but equivalent approaches of which Einstein’s interpretation is only one. From a field-theoretical perspective, however, the construction of a consistent theory for a Lorentz-invariant massless spin-2 particle uniquely leads to General Relativity. Keeping Lorentz invariance then implies that any modification of General Relativity will inevitably introduce additional propagating degrees of freedom into the gravity sector. Adopting this perspective, we will review the recent progress in constructing consistent field theories of gravity based on additional scalar, vector and tensor fields. Within this conceptual framework, we will discuss theories with Galileons, with Lagrange densities as constructed by Horndeski and beyond, extended to DHOST interactions, or containing generalised Proca fields and extensions thereof, or several Proca fields, as well as bigravity theories and scalar–vector–tensor theories. We will review the motivation of their inception, different formulations, and essential results obtained within these classes of theories together with their empirical viability.
Results are presented of a search for heavy particles decaying into two photons. The analysis is based on a 19.7fb−1 sample of proton–proton collisions at s=8TeV collected with the CMS detector at ...the CERN LHC. The diphoton mass spectrum from 150 to 850GeV is used to search for an excess of events over the background. The search is extended to new resonances with natural widths of up to 10% of the mass value. No evidence for new particle production is observed and limits at 95% confidence level on the production cross section times branching fraction to diphotons are determined. These limits are interpreted in terms of two-Higgs-doublet model parameters.
We consider charged black holes with scalar hair obtained in a class of Einstein–Maxwell– scalar models, where the scalar field is coupled to the Maxwell invariant with a quartic coupling function. ...Besides the Reissner–Nordström black holes, these models allow for black holes with scalar hair. Scrutinizing the domain of existence of these hairy black holes, we observe a critical behavior. A limiting configuration is encountered at a critical value of the charge, where space time splits into two parts: an inner space time with a finite scalar field and an outer extremal Reissner–Nordström space time. Such a pattern was first observed in the context of gravitating non-Abelian magnetic monopoles and their hairy black holes.
In 2014, Gromov vaguely conjectured that a sequence of manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature should have a subsequence which converges in some weak sense to a limit space with some generalized ...notion of nonnegative scalar curvature. The conjecture has been made precise at an IAS Emerging Topics meeting: requiring that the sequence be three dimensional with uniform upper bounds on diameter and volume, and a positive uniform lower bound on MinA, which is the minimum area of a closed minimal surface in the manifold. Here we present a sequence of warped product manifolds with warped circles over standard spheres, that have circular fibres over the poles whose length diverges to infinity, that satisfy the hypotheses of this IAS conjecture. We prove this sequence converges in the W1,p sense for p<2 to an extreme limit space that has nonnegative scalar curvature in the distributional sense as defined by Lee-LeFloch and that the total distributional scalar curvature converges. This paper only requires expertise in smooth Riemannian Geometry, smooth minimal surfaces, and Sobolev Spaces. In a second paper, requiring expertise in metric geometry, the first two authors prove intrinsic flat and Gromov–Hausdorff convergence of our sequence to this extreme limit space and investigate its geometric properties.
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