4.5 Article

A Modified Gravity Theory: Null Aether

Journal

COMMUNICATIONS IN THEORETICAL PHYSICS
Volume 71, Issue 3, Pages 312-326

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0253-6102/71/3/312

Keywords

Aether theory; Newtonian limit; black holes; cosmological solutions; Kerr-Schild-Kundt class of metrics; Ads-plane waves; pp-waves

Funding

  1. Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK)

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General quantum gravity arguments predict that Lorentz symmetry might not hold exactly in nature. This has motivated much interest in Lorentz breaking gravity theories recently. Among such models are vector-tensor theories with preferred direction established at every point of spacetime by a fixed-norm vector field. The dynamical vector field defined in this way is referred to as the aether. In this paper, we put forward the idea of a null aether field and introduce, for the first time, the Null Aether Theory (NAT) - a vector-tensor theory. We first study the Newtonian limit of this theory and then construct exact spherically symmetric black hole solutions in the theory in four dimensions, which contain Vaidya-type non-static solutions and static Schwarzschild-(A) dS type solutions, Reissner-Nordstrom-(A)dS type solutions and solutions of conformal gravity as special cases. Afterwards, we study the cosmological solutions in NAT: We find some exact solutions with perfect fluid distribution for spatially flat FLRW metric and null aether propagating along the x direction. We observe that there are solutions in which the universe has big-bang singularity and null field diminishes asymptotically. We also study exact gravitational wave solutions - AdS-plane waves and pp-waves - in this theory in any dimension D >= 3. Assuming the Kerr-Schild-Kundt class of metrics for such solutions, we show that the full field equations of the theory are reduced to two, in general coupled, differential equations when the background metric assumes the maximally symmetric form. The main conclusion of these computations is that the spin-0 aether field acquires a mass determined by the cosmological constant of the background spacetime and the Lagrange multiplier given in the theory.

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