Cosmology in Teleparallel Gravity

Abstract: The Lagrangian of General Relativity (GR) is the curvature R of the Levi-Cevita connection in a curved spacetime. Teleparallism is an alternative theory of gravity which employs as the fundamental variable the torsion T and/or non-metricity Q of a curvature-free "teleparallel" connection. In his doctoral thesis the speaker has looked extensively at teleparallel extensions of GR and their consequences for cosmological and black hole spacetimes. He will present novel cosmological background and perturbation solutions in which the teleparallel connection becomes a dynamical field, leading ultimately to a non-metricity based cosmology where the connection can mimic dark matter or dark energy with an extra gravitational wave mode propagating on top.

Speaker: Dr. Simon Kuhn is a researcher deeply invested in exploring the frontiers of theoretical physics, particularly in the extensions of Einsteinian gravity. His work is driven by the unresolved challenges within general relativity and cosmology, such as the non-renormalizability of gravity, the cosmological constant problem, and the mysteries surrounding dark matter and singularities.