Jorge Gigante Valcarcel

We formulate cosmological perturbation theory around the spatially curved FLRW background in the context of metric-affine gauge theory of gravity which includes torsion and nonmetricity. Performing scalar-vector-tensor decomposition of the spatial perturbations, we find that the theory displays a rich perturbation spectrum with helicities 0, 1, 2, and 3, on top of the usual scalar, vector, and tensor metric perturbations arising from Riemannian geometry. Accordingly, the theory provides a diverse phenomenology, e.g. the helicity-2 modes of the torsion and/or nonmetricity tensors source helicity-2 metric tensor perturbation at the linear level leading to the production of gravitational waves. As an immediate application, we study linear perturbation of the nonmetricity helicity-3 modes for a general parity-preserving action of metric-affine gravity which includes quadratic terms in curvature, torsion, and nonmetricity. We then find the conditions to avoid possible instabilities in the helicity-3 modes of the spin-3 field.

We analyze the stability of the vector and axial sectors of Poincaré gauge theory around general backgrounds in the presence of cubic-order invariants defined from the curvature and torsion tensors, showing how the latter can in fact cancel out well-known instabilities arising from the quadratic curvature invariants of the theory and accordingly help in the construction of healthy models with both curvature and torsion. For this task, we introduce the most general parity-preserving cubic Lagrangian with mixing terms of the curvature and torsion tensors, and find the relations of its coefficients to avoid a pathological behavior from the vector and axial modes of torsion. As a result, on top of the gravitational constant of general relativity and the mass parameters of torsion, our action contains 23 additional coupling constants controlling the dynamics of this field. As in the quadratic Poincaré gauge theory, we show that a further restriction on the cubic part of the action allows the existence of Reissner-Nordström-like black hole solutions with dynamical torsion.

We present a complete algebraic classification for the curvature tensor in Weyl-Cartan geometry, by applying methods of eigenvalues and principal null directions on its irreducible decomposition under the group of global Lorentz transformations, thus providing a full invariant characterisation of all the possible algebraic types of the torsion and nonmetricity field strength tensors in Weyl-Cartan space-times. As an application, we show that in the framework of Metric-Affine Gravity the field strength tensors of a dynamical torsion field cannot be doubly aligned with the principal null directions of the Riemannian Weyl tensor in scalar-flat, slowly rotating, stationary and axisymmetric space-times.

We present a complete algebraic classification for the curvature tensor in Weyl-Cartan geometry, by applying methods of eigenvalues and principal null directions on its irreducible decomposition under the group of global Lorentz transformations, thus providing a full invariant characterization of all the possible algebraic types of the torsion and nonmetricity field strength tensors in Weyl-Cartan spacetimes. As an application, we show that in the framework of metric-affine gravity the field-strength tensors of a dynamical torsion field cannot be doubly aligned with the principal null directions of the Riemannian Weyl tensor in scalar-flat, slowly rotating, stationary and axisymmetric space-times.

In the framework of Metric-Affine Gravity, the existing correspondence between the Einstein tensor and the energy-momentum tensor of matter provided by General Relativity is extended towards a post-Riemannian description in terms of the torsion and nonmetricity fields, which are sourced by the spin, dilation and shear currents of matter. In this work, we focus on the dynamical role of the traceless part of the nonmetricity tensor and its intrinsic connection with shears, defining a model which encloses a new black hole solution endowed with shear charges. We show that the extension in the presence of dynamical torsion and Weyl vector leads to the broadest family of static and spherically symmetric black hole solutions with spin, dilation and shear charges in Metric-Affine Gravity so far.

We revisit the definition and some of the characteristics of quadratic theories of gravity with torsion. We start from the most general Lagrangian density quadratic in the curvature and torsion tensors. By assuming that General Relativity should be recovered when torsion vanishes and investigating the behaviour of the vector and pseudovector torsion fields in the weak-gravity regime, we present a set of necessary conditions for the stability of these theories. Moreover, we explicitly obtain the gravitational field equations using the Palatini variational principle with the metricity condition implemented via a Lagrange multiplier.