Eddington gravity with matter: An emergent perspective

Abstract

We describe an action principle, within the framework of the Eddington gravity, which incorporates the matter fields in a simple manner. Interestingly, the gravitational field equations derived from this action is identical to the Einstein's equations, in contrast with the earlier attempts in the literature. The cosmological constant arises as an integration constant in this approach. In fact, the derivation of the field equations demands the existence of a non-zero cosmological constant, thereby providing the raison d'être for a non-zero cosmological constant, implied by the current observations. Several features of our approach strongly support the paradigm that gravity is an emergent phenomenon and, in this perspective, our action principle could have a possible origin in the microstructure of the spacetime. We also discuss several extensions of the action principle, including the one which can incorporate torsion in the spacetime. We also show that an Eddington-like action can be constructed to obtain the field equations of the Lanczos-Lovelock gravity.

20 pages, no figures

References in corpus (6)

• Gravitational action with null boundaries
• Dark Energy and Gravity
• Eddington-Born-Infeld gravity and the large scale structure of the Universe
• Boundary terms of the Einstein-Hilbert action
• Boundary and Corner Terms in the Action for General Relativity
• Black hole and cosmological space-times in Born-Infeld-Einstein theory

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Ricci-Determinant Gravity: Dynamical Aspects and Astrophysical Implications
• Dynamical aspects of asymmetric Eddington gravity with scalar fields