Shinji Mukohyama

This article reviews basic construction and cosmological implications of a power-counting renormalizable theory of gravitation recently proposed by Horava. We explain that (i) at low energy this theory does not exactly recover general relativity but instead mimic general relativity plus dark matter; that (ii) higher spatial curvature terms allow bouncing and cyclic universes as regular solutions; and that (iii) the anisotropic scaling with the dynamical critical exponent z=3 solves the horizon p

We find the explicit coordinate transformation which links two exact cosmological solutions of the brane world which have been recently discovered. This means that both solutions are exactly the same as each other. One of the two solutions is described by the motion of a domain wall in the well-known five-dimensional Schwarzshild-AdS spacetime. Hence, we can easily understand the region covered by the coordinate used by another solution.

In the nonrelativistic theory of gravitation recently proposed by Ho\ifmmode \check{r}\else \v{r}\fi{}ava, the Hamiltonian constraint is not a local equation satisfied at each spatial point but an equation integrated over a whole space. The global Hamiltonian constraint is less restrictive than its local version, and allows a richer set of solutions than in general relativity. We show that a component which behaves like pressureless dust emerges as an ``integration constant'' of dynamical equati

Gravitational perturbations of anti--de Sitter (AdS) spacetime play important roles in the AdS conformal field theory correspondence and the brane world scenario. In this paper, we develop a gauge-invariant formalism of gravitational perturbations of maximally symmetric spacetimes including anti--de Sitter spacetime. The existence of scalar-type master variables is shown and the corresponding master equations are derived.

Brane cosmology driven by the tachyon rolling down to its ground state is investigated. We adopt an effective field theoretical description for the tachyon and Randall-Sundrum type brane-world scenario. After formulating the basic equations, we show that the standard cosmology with the usual scalar field can mimic the low-energy behavior of the system near the tachyon ground state. We also investigate the qualitative behavior of the system beyond the low-energy regime for a positive, negative, a

We discuss a mechanism of particle production during inflation that can result in a blue gravitational wave (GW) spectrum, compatible with the BICEP2 result and with the r < 0.11 limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio at the Planck pivot scale. The mechanism is based on the production of vector quanta from a rolling pseudo-scalar field. Both the vector and the pseudo-scalar are only gravitationally coupled to the inflaton, to keep the production of inflaton quanta at an unobservable level (the over

There are at least four versions of Horava-Lishitz gravity in the literature. We consider the version without the detailed balance condition with the projectability condition and address one aspect of the theory: avoidance of caustics for constant time hypersurfaces. We show that there is no caustic with plane symmetry in the absence of matter source if \lambda\ne 1. If \lambda=1 is a stable IR fixed point of the renormalization group flow then \lambda is expected to deviate from 1 near would-be

We investigate how the ghost condensate reacts to black holes immersed in it. A ghost condensate defines a hypersurface-orthogonal congruence of timelike curves, each of which has the tangent vector ${u}^{\ensuremath{\mu}}=\ensuremath{-}{g}^{\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\nu}}{\ensuremath{\partial}}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}\ensuremath{\phi}$. It is argued that the ghost condensate in this picture approximately corresponds to a congruence of geodesics. In other words, the ghost condensate accretes into a

We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a nonstandard kinetic term whose coefficient diverges at zero curvature as well as the standard kinetic term. Because of the divergent coefficient of the kinetic term, the lowest energy state is never achieved. Instead, the cosmological constant automatically stalls at or near zero. The merit of this model

The brick-wall model seeks to explain the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a wall contribution to the thermal entropy of ambient quantum fields raised to the Hawking temperature. Reservations have been expressed concerning the self-consistency of this model. For example, it predicts large thermal energy densities near the wall, producing a substantial mass correction and, presumably, a large gravitational back reaction. We re-examine this model and conclude that these reservations are unfounded onc

The junction condition across a singular surface in general relativity, formulated by Israel, has double covariance. In this paper, a general perturbation scheme of the junction condition around an arbitrary background is given in a doubly covariant way. After that, as an application of the general scheme, we consider perturbation of the junction condition around a background with the symmetry of a $(D-2)$-dimensional constant curvature space, where $D$ is the dimensionality of the spacetime. Th