Lorentz violation, Gravity, Dissipation and Holography

We reconsider Lorentz Violation (LV) at the fundamental level. We show that Lorentz Violation is intimately connected with gravity and that LV couplings in QFT must always be fields in a gravitational sector. Diffeomorphism invariance must be intact and the LV couplings transform as tensors under coordinate/frame changes. Therefore searching for LV is one of the most sensitive ways of looking for new physics, either new interactions or modifications of known ones. Energy dissipation/Cerenkov radiation is shown to be a generic feature of LV in QFT. A general computation is done in strongly coupled theories with gravity duals. It is shown that in scale invariant regimes, the energy dissipation rate depends non-triviallly on two characteristic exponents, the Lifshitz exponent and the hyperscaling violation exponent.Comment: LateX, 51 pages, 9 figures. (v2) References and comments added. Misprints correcte

Leptogenesis from loop effects in curved spacetime

We describe a new mechanism -- radiatively-induced gravitational leptogenesis -- for generating the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. We show how quantum loop effects in C and CP violating theories cause matter and antimatter to propagate differently in the presence of gravity, and prove this is forbidden in flat space by CPT and translation symmetry. This generates a curvature-dependent chemical potential for leptons, allowing a matter-antimatter asymmetry to be generated in thermal equilibrium in the early Universe. The time-dependent dynamics necessary for leptogenesis is provided by the interaction of the virtual self-energy cloud of the leptons with the expanding curved spacetime background, which violates the strong equivalence principle and allows a distinction between matter and antimatter. We show here how this mechanism is realised in a particular BSM theory, the see-saw model, where the quantum loops involve the heavy sterile neutrinos responsible for light neutrino masses. We demonstrate by explicit computation of the relevant two-loop Feynman diagrams how the size of the radiative corrections relevant for leptogenesis becomes enhanced by increasing the mass hierarchy of the sterile neutrinos, and show that for realistic phenomenological parameters this mechanism can generate the observed baryon-to-photon ratio of the Universe

Parity Violation in Graviton Non-gaussianity

We study parity violation in graviton non-gaussianity generated during inflation. We develop a useful formalism to calculate graviton non-gaussianity. Using this formalism, we explicitly calculate the parity violating part of the bispectrum for primordial gravitational waves in the exact de Sitter spacetime and prove that no parity violation appears in the non-gaussianity. We also extend the analysis to slow-roll inflation and find that the parity violation of the bispectrum is proportional to the slow-roll parameter. We argue that parity violating non-gaussianity can be tested by the CMB. Our results are also useful for calculating three-point function of the stress tensor in the non-conformal field theory through the gravity/field theory correspondence.Comment: v2:style changed to JHEP, 21 pages, references added; v3: published version in JHE

Towards Matter Inflation in Heterotic String Theory

Recently, a class of inflation models in supergravity with gauge non-singlet matter fields as the inflation has been proposed. It is based on a ‘tribrid’ structure in the superpotential and on a ‘Heisenberg symmetry’ for solving the η-problem. We suggest that a generalization of this model class may be suitable for realising inflation in heterotic orbifold compactifications, where the Heisenberg symmetry is a property of the tree-level Kähler potential of untwisted matter fields. We discuss moduli stabilization in this setup and propose a mechanism to stabilize the modulus associated to the inflation, which respects the symmetry in the large radius limit. Inflation ends via a `waterfall' phase transition, as in hybrid inflation. We give conditions which have to be satisfied for realising inflation along these lines in the matter sector of heterotic orbifolds