arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S. Deser.
I prove an old unsolved conjecture, the hard part of its obvious sufficiency, namely that all identically conserved symmetric two-tensors are necessarily metric variations of invariant actions, thus sparing the world more alternative gravity theories. The proof is reasonably simple, if perhaps a physicist's.
I review the role and meaning of the Anthropic Principle, particularly in its relevance to particle physics.
I show, on the most elementary grounds, its classical ultraviolet catastrophe, that even source-free General Relativity must be quantized, despite some eminent opinions to the contrary, an original result involving some rather tricky subtleties.
I describe the early, from the nineteen sixties, history of attempts at quantizing General Relativity.
Some time ago, we showed that a weak (linear) massless spin 2 wave could only propagate on a Ricci-flat or Ricci-constant background: it must necessarily be a perturbation of General Relativity. This was just the continuation of the higher spin chain: massless $s=3/2$ also required Ricci-flatness (which is the basis of supergravity) while $s>2$ needs Riemann flatness. This note re-analyzes the problem in a perhaps more physical way: by considering massless and -- only apparently -- massive small excitations and showing how their parameters relate to the cosmological constant. We will thus prove, in a simple physical way, the necessity, as well as the sufficiency, of the known supergravity results.
I give a brief review of the search for a proper definition of energy in General Relativity (GR), a far from trivial quest, which was only completed after four and a half decades. The equally (or perhaps more) difficult task of establishing its positivity -- it was to take another fifteen plus years -- will then be summarized. Extension to cosmological GR is included. Mention is made of some recent offshoots.
I review the meaning of General Relativity (GR), viewed as a dynamical field, rather than as geometry, as effected by the 1958-61 anti-geometrical work of ADM. This very brief non-technical summary, is intended for historians.
We study, using the example of general covariance, to what extent a would-be non-abelian extension of free field abelian gauge theory can be helped by a field redefinition; answer - not much! However, models resulting from dimensional reduction also include non-gauge fields to be integrated out, thereby offering a wider choice of redefinitions whose effects may indeed prove useful.
To celebrate Roman Jackiw's 80th birthday, herewith some comments on gravity and gauge theory models in D=3, the chief focus of many of our joint efforts.
Two simple, if Draconian, assumptions about classical gravity fix space-time's dimension at D=4
I summarize, at its 41st--and what would have been Bruno's 94th--birthday, the history of the discoveries of Supergravity and some of its structure and later developments.
We present an improved version of our original cosmological model to explain the current phase of cosmological acceleration without resorting to a cosmological constant or any other mass scale. Like the original, this phenomenological approach is based on an effective quantum gravitational action, but now depends on the original nonlocal dimensionless scalar $X = \square^{-1} R$ only through $Y = \square^{-1} g^{μν} X_{,μ} X_{,ν}$. Both $X$ and $Y$ are quiescent during the radiation-dominated ($R=0$) era, both only grow logarithmically during matter dominance, and neither affects the propagation of gravitational radiation. However, while $X$ has the same sign for gravitationally bound systems as for cosmology, we show that the sign of $Y$ differs for the two cases: it is positive for cosmology and negative for strongly gravitationally bound systems. We can therefore enforce the $Λ$CDM expansion history by making a suitable choice of the nonlocal distortion function $f(Y)$ for $Y > 0$, while ensuring that there is no change in the heavily constrained solar system phenomenology simply by making $f$ vanish for $Y < 0$ without discontinuity. The required $f(Y>0)$ is determined numerically to have a strikingly simple exponential form.
The title's century-old conjecture is established fpr D=2 and is likely for all D.
I exhibit the conflicting roles of Noether's two great theorems in defining conserved quantities, especially Energy in General Relativity and its extensions: It is the breaking of coordinate invariance through boundary conditions that removes the barrier her second theorem otherwise poses to the applicability of her first. There is nothing new here, except the emphasis that General must be broken down to Special Relativity in a special, but physically natural, way in order for the Poincare or other global groups such as (A)dS to "re-"emerge.
Noether's theorem, that local gauge variations of gauge invariant actions are identically conserved (more tautologically, that gauge variations of gauge invariants vanish) was established a century ago. Its converse, in the geometric context: are all identically conserved local symmetric tensors variations of some coordinate invariant action? remains unsolved to this day. We survey its present state and discuss some of our concrete attempts at a solution, including a significant improvement. For notational simplicity, details are primarily given in $D=2$, but we discuss generic $D$ as well.
While non-action generated, but identically conserved,-abelian and non-gauge vectors exist, they are unsuitable for building alternate field equations because they have no stress-tensor, hence do not permit Poincare generators and, most phiyically, cannot couple consistently to gravity. Separately, their geometric analogues -covariantly conserved non-Lagrangian symmetric tensors-probably do not exist, but their weak field, abelian counterparts do, and share the vector fields' absence of generators.
Covariantization is of course required for initially flat space matter to couple consistently to GR; here I show in detail for concrete systems how it follows in the same physical way as that deriving GR itself from its initial free-field form.
Brief recollections of two giants of physics, their origins, similarities and differences.