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arXiv · 2108.05705

Induced gravitational topological term and the Einstein-Cartan modified theory

Abstract

It is well known that only the axial piece of the torsion couples minimally to fermions in a Riemann-Cartan geometry, while the other ones decouple. In this paper, we consider the Dirac field minimally coupled to a dynamical background with torsion and compute its contribution to the fermionic one-loop effective action. Such a contribution owns topological nature since it can be linked with topological invariants from Riemann-Cartan spaces, like Nieh-Yan and Chern-Simons terms. Furthermore, we propose a novel modified theory of gravity constructed by adding the aforementioned one-loop contribution to the Einstein-Cartan action. The modified field equations reduce to those ones of GR under certain circumstances, providing therefore trivial solutions. However, in particular, we find a non-trivial solution where the modified field equations do not reduce to the GR ones.

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BibTeXRIS

J. R. Nascimento, A. Yu. Petrov, P. J. Porfírio. 2021-08-12. Induced gravitational topological term and the Einstein-Cartan modified theory. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.105.044053

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