Light on curved backgrounds

QED2 in Curved Backgrounds

Here we discuss the two dimensional quantum electrodynamics in curved spacetime, especially in the background of some black holes. We first show the existence of some new quantum mechanical solution which has interesting properties. Then for some special black holes we discuss the fermion-black hole scattering problem. The issue of confinement is intimately connected with these solutions and we...

Quantum Field Theory on Curved Backgrounds

Vacuum decay in curved backgrounds

We evaluate the effect of gravity on the probability of vacuum decay through bubble nucleation for a scalar field in an arbitrary curved background up to first order in an expansion in powers of Rp’, where R is the scalar curvature of the background metric at the location of the bubble and p is the size of the bubble as it would appear in a flat space. The mechanism by which a scalar field in a...

A note on spin two fields in curved backgrounds

We reconsider the consistency constraints on a free massless symmetric, rank 2, tensor field in a background and confirm that they uniquely require it to be the linear deviation about (cosmological) Einstein gravity. Neither adding non-minimal higher derivative terms nor changing the gauge transformations by allowing terms non-analytic in the cosmological constant alters this fact.

IMEX evolution of scalar fields on curved backgrounds

Inspiral of binary black holes occurs over a time-scale of many orbits, far longer than the dynamical time-scale of the individual black holes. Explicit evolutions of a binary system therefore require excessively many time-steps to capture interesting dynamics. We present a strategy to overcome the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition in such evolutions, one relying on modern implicit-explicit ODE...