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Leonardo Modesto

Publications and source records attributed to Leonardo Modesto.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Gravitational Aharonov-Bohm effect: theory and experiment

We study the quantum interference of two paths that enclose a slowly rotating, infinitely long, and infinitely thin cylindrical shell, using the spacetime metric induced by the gravitational source. We show that the rotation of the shell affects the interference pattern even though it does not contribute to the classical motion of particles propagating outside the shell. Furthermore, we find that the gravitomagnetic field is non-vanishing only in the region inside the shell, yet it contributes to the interference taking place entirely in the exterior region. This phenomenon is therefore a gravitational analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, in which a field confined to an inaccessible region influences the quantum phase of particles propagating in a field-free region.

gr-qc

Superconductive or superfluid condensation in curved spacetime

We provide a proof of unitarity for quantum field theory in a general spacetime. Our argument expresses the Bogoliubov transformations in terms of a unitary squeezing operator relating the initial and final Hilbert spaces. The $S$-matrix in curved spacetime is thus the product of the squeezing operator and the $S$-matrix in the out-Hilbert space (typically Minkowski). Since both factors are unitary, their product is unitary. It follows that the Bogoliubov in-vacuum is described by a BCS-like state (Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer): (i) for fermions, it is exactly the BCS state, but with electrons and positrons in place of electrons with opposite spin; (ii) for bosons, it is the Bose--Einstein condensate (BEC) superfluid ground state. Thus, gravity, or an accelerating force, creates from the vacuum a many-particle system unstable towards forming a new ground state of Cooper pairs. Technically, gravity converts the vacuum into an electron-positron condensate, with respect to which quantum field theory evolves unitarily. By reverse engineering, we reconstruct the effective Hamiltonian of QFT in a black hole (or Rindler) background, together with a simple formula for the mass gap function, which grows approximately linearly with the temperature. Hence, electrons and positrons condense into a superconducting state at increasingly higher temperatures as the black hole mass decreases. Unitarity and the particle interpretation are preserved at every stage of evaporation. The Hawking state is exactly a BCS state. Finally, we compute the entanglement entropy and derive the area law.

hep-th

Acausal exact vacuum solutions in nonlocal gravity

Nonlocal gravity is a promising super-renormalizable or finite quantum gravity theory consistent with unitarity. In this paper, we focus on the classical equations of motion and explicitly show that a particular subclass of G\"{o}del-type Universes, where closed time-like curves are allowed, is an exact solution of nonlocal gravity in vacuum. The result is consistent with a well defined theory at quantum level, but it is realized only with a special, although large, class of nonlocal form factors. Therefore, by itself the renormalizability requirement is not a sufficient guiding principle in vacuum whether we want to avoid the causality violation. From the physical point of view, the causality violation takes place from the non locality fundamental scale to macroscopic scales. Therefore, it is the presence of matter to break the classical degeneracy between the Minkowski and the G\"{o}del Universe. Finally, we have shown that at the non-perturbative quantum level the transition from a flat to a G\"{o}del Universe is ridiculously small.

gr-qc

Eikonal, nonlocality and regular black holes

We investigate the leading gravitational eikonal in nonlocal $D$ dimensional theories of gravity. We analyze the simplest cases of $2\rightarrow2$ massless and massive scalar scattering at tree level, studying the effects of nonlocal form factors in the gravitational sector. We give an interpretation of our results in terms of geodesic motion in effective generalized Aichelburg-Sexl geometries for the massless case, and in smeared linearized Schwarzschild metrics for the massive case in the probe limit. Combining our results for the geometries at linearized level with general requirements about the behaviour of the solutions in the core, we propose a nonlinear completion of the geometries. The resulting spacetimes describe singularity-free, asymptotically flat deformations of the Schwarzschild solution with a de Sitter core. We also analyze the main geometric and thermodynamic features of these solutions.

hep-th

Ultraviolet completion of the inflationary paradigm

After an exhaustive introduction highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the non-local models proposed so far as ultraviolet completions of the Starobinsky theory, we propose a new nonlocal completion of a general $f(R)$ theory (in the Einstein's frame) suitable for driving inflation in the early universe consistently with observations. The nonlocal theory shares with $f(R)$ the same background solutions and the same equations of motion for perturbations at linear and nonlinear level. Therefore, the classical cosmological observables are not affected by the nonlocal operators needed for the quantum completion. Our construction applies to any local action written in the Einstein's frame, but we will provide the details only for two explicit examples: the Starobinsky model and a general $f(R)$ theory. The new model overcomes the incompatibility of renormalizability and stability present in the previous proposals. Since the nonlocal theory is at least super-renormalizable, but can also be finite depending on the details of the model, this work shows the consistency of the inflationary paradigm with a well-defined quantum theory of gravity at high energy. We could rephrase the latter statement saying that the success of the $f(R)$ theories in cosmology can be traced back to the existence of an ultraviolet completion that preserves all the classical features. The inflationary paradigm survives, or it is actually insensitive to quantum gravity, because it is an exact solution of quantum gravity, up to perturbative corrections.

gr-qc

Taming singularities and chaos in conformal gravity

We hereby address the cosmological singularity problem in a general gravitational theory invariant under Weyl conformal transformations. In particular, we focus on the Bianchi IX spacetime and we show that both the initial (big bang) and final (big crunch) singularities disappear in an infinite class of conformal frames naturally selected according to analyticity. It turns out that the past and future singularities are both unattainable within a finite affine parameter (for massless particles) or within a finite proper time (for massive and conformally coupled particles). In order to prove such a statement, we show the geodesic completion of the spacetime when probed by massless, massive, and conformally coupled particles. Finally, the chaotic behavior of the spacetime near the singularity is tamed by a conformal rescaling that turns the Bianchi IX metric into a quasi-FLRW spacetime.

gr-qc

Visions in Quantum Gravity

To deepen our understanding of Quantum Gravity and its connections with black holes and cosmology, building a common language and exchanging ideas across different approaches is crucial. The Nordita Program "Quantum Gravity: from gravitational effective field theories to ultraviolet complete approaches" created a platform for extensive discussions, aimed at pinpointing both common grounds and sources of disagreements, with the hope of generating ideas and driving progress in the field. This contribution summarizes the twelve topical discussions held during the program and collects individual thoughts of speakers and panelists on the future of the field in light of these discussions.

hep-th

Do Black Holes Exist?

We carefully investigate, extend, and shed new light on the McVittie exact solution of Einstein's gravity (EG) with the focus on the implications in the Universe we live in. It turns out that the only known exact solution of EG, which interpolates between an asymptotic homogeneous and isotropic Universe and a Schwarzschild black hole, is actually singular in 2M, namely, the curvature invariants diverge and the spacetime is geodetically incomplete in 2M. Very important: all energy conditions are satisfied except the dominant one (DEC), which is violated inside the radius 8M/3. Notice that 2M is not the event horizon, but a curvature singularity covered by an apparent horizon that, at the actual stage of the Universe, nearly coincides with 2M. Moreover, the curvature singularity is not analytic with respect to the dynamics of the Universe encoded in the Hubble function $H(t)$: for arbitrarily small but not zero $H^\prime(t)$, the curvature invariants are singular, while for $H^\prime(t)$ identically zero, they are regular. Therefore, we can not analytically decouple the black hole from the entire Cosmos, namely, we can not assume the Schwarzschild solution locally and the FRW metric at large scale without violating the analyticity of the metric. Since the spacetime does not exist for $r \leqslant$2M, and since the DEC is violated for r<8M/3, we are allowed to doubt the existence of black holes in our Universe as understood up to now. In particular, the violation of DEC seems catastrophic for the spacetime stability below 8M/3. We build and study a toy model for the gravitational collapse, generalizing the Vaidya to the McVittie-Vaidya metric. Although dynamical, the singularities remain in the same locations. Finally, in order to achieve the curvature smoothness and geodesic completion, we propose two solutions: one in Einstein's conformal gravity, and the other replacing M with M(r).

gr-qc

Amplitude prescriptions in field theories with complex poles

In the context of field theories with complex poles, we scrutinize four inequivalent ways of defining the scattering amplitudes, each forfeiting one or more tenets of standard quantum field theory while preserving the others: (i) a textbook Wick rotation by analytic continuation of the external momenta from Euclidean to Lorentzian signature (no optical theorem), (ii) the Lee--Wick--Nakanishi prescription, integrating along a certain contour in the complex energy plane (no Lorentz invariance), (iiii) the fakeon prescription, where, in addition, spatial momenta are integrated on a complex path defined by the locus of singularities of the loop integrand (no analyticity of the amplitude) and (iv) to work directly on Minkowski spacetime, which violates the optical theorem and also bars power-counting renormalizability. In general, mixed Euclidean-Lorentzian prescriptions for internal and external momenta in loop integrals break Lorentz invariance, regardless of the type of masses involved. We conclude that, of the above four options, only the fakeon prescription is physically viable and can have applications to quantum gravity.

hep-th

A Quantum Superposition of Black Hole Evaporation Histories: Recovering Unitarity

Black hole evaporation is one of the most striking phenomena at the interface between gravity and quantum physics. In Hawking's semi-classical treatment, where matter is quantum mechanical and the spacetime is definite and classical, evaporation leads to an apparent loss of unitarity of the overall evolution, and to the so-called black hole information paradox. Here, we go beyond this semi-classical treatment and formulate a toy quantum model of black hole evaporation that allows the black hole to evolve into a superposition of being fully evaporated and not fully evaporated, consistent with the Hawking particles being in a coherent superposition of different energy levels. We model Hawking particle production by the repeated action of quantum-controlled unitaries, generating emission from the quantum black hole and accounting for a quantum coherent back-reaction on the black hole matter state. We show that the probability of full annihilation of the black hole matter increases with time until the black hole is, asymptotically, fully evaporated in every branch of the quantum superposition. We prove that under natural assumptions, this evaporation model is unitary, such that the initial state can in principle be recovered from the final asymptotic state of the radiation.

gr-qc

Conformalons: a new class of black hole mimickers

In any conformally invariant gravitational theory, the space of exact solutions is greatly enlarged. Therefore, we cannot exclude the Weyl's conformal invariance to be spontaneously broken to spherically symmetric vacuum solutions that exclude the spacetime region inside the black hole's event horizon from our Universe. We baptize these solutions {\it conformalons}. It turns out that for all such spacetimes nothing can reach the Schwarzschild event horizon in a finite amount of proper time for conformally coupled ``massive'' particles, or finite values of the affine parameter for massless particles. Therefore, for such vacuum solutions the surface $r = 2 M$ becomes an asymptotic region of the Universe. As a general feature, all conformalons show a gravitational blueshift instead of a gravitational redshift at the unattainable Schwarzschild event horizon, hence avoiding the Trans-Planckian problem in the Hawking evaporation process. Unexpectedly, the Hawking's temperature of the conformalons turns out to be negative and the thermodynamic interpretation leads us to speculate about a possible maximum energy state of the Hawking radiation. Contrary to the Schwarzschild spacetime, for the conformalons the gravitational collapse consists of matter that falls down forever towards the Schwarzschild horizon without ever reaching it. Hence, the annihilation process between the matter and Hawking's negative energy particles takes place outside the surface at $r = 2 M$. Finally, the information is not lost in the whole process of singularity-free collapse and evaporation.

gr-qc

Stable Wormholes in Conformal Gravity

We present a class of Lorentzian traversable wormholes in conformal gravity, constructed via Weyl rescaling of Minkowski spacetime. As a result, these wormholes are solutions of every theory of gravity that is both conformally invariant and admits Minkowski spacetime as a solution. We specifically examine the case of a wormhole possessing a Morris-Thorne shape function, arising as a solution of a scalar-tensor conformally invariant theory of gravity. We show that these solutions represent regular, traversable wormholes that are also stable at the linear perturbation level. We argue that, when the Weyl symmetry is spontaneously broken, the broken symmetry phase may lead to a stable ``wormhole phase" alternative to the flat ``Minkowski phase".

gr-qc

Testing quantum gravity with primordial gravitational waves

We propose a testable alternative to inflation directly built in a very general class of ultraviolet complete theories of quantum gravity enjoying Weyl invariance. After the latter is spontaneously broken, logarithmic quantum corrections to the action make both the primordial tensor spectrum (from graviton fluctuations) and the scalar spectrum (from thermal fluctuations) quasi scale invariant. We predict a scalar spectral index $n_{\rm s}$ which only depends on two parameters and is consistent with observations, a tensor index $n_{\rm t} =1-n_{\rm s}>0$, and, if the fundamental energy scale of the theory $Λ_*=M_{\textrm{Pl}}$ is of order of the Planck mass, a tensor-to-scalar ratio $r_{0.05}\approx 0.01$ detectable by BICEP Array and LiteBIRD in the immediate or near future, respectively, and a blue-tilted stochastic gravitational-wave background observable by DECIGO in the further future. From the observational constraint $r_{0.05}<0.036$, we also find the lower bound $Λ_*> 8.5\times 10^{10}\,{\rm GeV}$, much stronger than any previous one for this class of theories.

gr-qc

On effective models of regular black holes inspired by higher-derivative and nonlocal gravity

In this work we study static spherically symmetric solutions of effective field equations related to local and nonlocal higher-derivative gravity models, based on their associated effective delta sources. This procedure has been applied to generate modifications of the Schwarzschild geometry in several contexts (e.g., modified gravity, string theory, noncommutative geometry, generalized uncertainty principle scenarios), but a general analysis of the possible equations of state and their influence on the solutions was still lacking. Here, we aim to fill this gap in the literature and investigate whether these metrics might be able to reproduce features of the solutions of higher-derivative gravity models. In particular, we present an equation of state such that the solution matches the Newtonian-limit one in both regimes of large and small $r$. A significant part of the work is dedicated to studying the curvature regularity of the solutions and the comparison with the linearized solutions. Explicit metrics are presented for effective sources originating from local and nonlocal models. The results obtained here might be regarded as possible links between the previous research on linearized higher-derivative gravity and the solutions of the nonlinear complete field equations, which remain unknown at the moment.

gr-qc

Form factors, spectral and Källén-Lehmann representation in nonlocal quantum gravity

We discuss the conical region of convergence of exponential and asymptotically polynomial form factors and their integral representations. Then, we calculate the spectral representation of the propagator of nonlocal theories with entire form factors, in particular, of the above type. The spectral density is positive-definite and exhibits the same spectrum as the local theory. We also find that the piece of the propagator corresponding to the time-ordered two-point correlation function admits a generalization of the Källén-Lehmann representation with a standard momentum dependence and a spectral density differing from the local one only in the presence of interactions. These results are in agreement with what already known about the free theory after a field redefinition and about perturbative unitarity of the interacting theory. The spectral and Källén-Lehmann representations have the same standard local limit, which is recovered smoothly when sending the fundamental length scale $\ell_*$ in the form factor to zero.

hep-th

Early universe in quantum gravity

We present a new picture of the early universe in finite nonlocal quantum gravity, which is Weyl invariant at the classical and quantum levels. The high-energy regime of the theory consists of two phases, a Weyl invariant trans-Planckian phase and a post-Planckian or Higgs phase described by an action quadratic in the Ricci tensor and where the cosmos evolves according to the standard radiation-dominated model. In the first phase, all the issues of the hot big bang such as the singularity, flatness, and horizon problems find a universal and simple non-inflationary solution by means of Weyl invariance, regardless of the microscopic details of the theory. In the second phase, once Weyl symmetry is spontaneously broken, primordial perturbations are generated around a background that asymptotically evolves as a radiation-dominated flat Friedmann--Lemaître--Robertson--Walker universe.

gr-qc

Path integral and conformal instability in nonlocal quantum gravity

We introduce the Lorentzian path integral of nonlocal quantum gravity. After introducing the functional measure, the Faddeev-Popov sector and the field correlators, we move to perturbation theory and describe Efimov analytic continuation of scattering amplitudes to Euclidean momenta and back to Lorentzian. We show that the conformal instability problem in the Euclidean path integral is solved by suitable gauge choices at the perturbative level. The three examples of Einstein gravity, Stelle gravity and nonlocal quantum gravity are given.

hep-th

Choked accretion onto Kerr-Sen black holes in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion gravity

We investigate the process of an ultrarelativistic fluid accreted onto axisymmetric Kerr-Sen black holes in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion theory. We obtain the solution describing the velocity potential of a stationary irrotational fluid with a stiff equation of state and the solution for the streamlined diagram of the quadrupolar flow. We also investigate how the solution's coefficients and the stagnation points are affected by the parameters. The injection rate, the ejection rate, and the critical angle are discussed in detail. We find that with an increasing dilaton parameter the ratio of the ejection rate to the injection rate increases and that the radiative efficiency is larger, while the redshift is lower, compared to the Kerr black hole.

astro-ph.HE