The discovery of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO collaboration [1] in 2016 has provided a direct test on the prediction made by Albert Einstein a century ago based on his general theory of relativity [2]. It has caused a significant influence worldwide on the basic research in science.

We investigate the chiral phase transition in the soft-wall model of AdS/QCD at zero chemical potential for two-flavor and three-flavor cases, respectively. We show that there is no spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the original soft-wall model. After detailed analysis, we find that in order to realize chiral symmetry breaking and restoration, both profiles for the scalar potential and the dilaton field are essential. The scalar potential determines the possible solution structure of the chiral condensate, except the mass term, it takes another quartic term for the two-flavor case, and for the three-flavor case, one has to take into account an extra cubic term due to the t’Hooft determinant interaction. The profile of the dilaton field reflects the gluodynamics, which is negative at a certain ultraviolet scale and approaches positive quadratic behavior at far infrared region. With this set-up, the spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the vacuum and its restoration at finite temperature can be realized perfectly. In the two-flavor case, it gives a second order chiral phase transition in the chiral limit, while the transition turns to be a crossover for any finite quark mass. In the case of three-flavor, the phase transition becomes a first order one in the chiral limit, while above sufficient large quark mass it turns to be a crossover again. This scenario agrees exactly with the current understanding on chiral phase transition from lattice QCD and other effective model studies.

Treating the gravitational force on the same footing as the electroweak and strong forces, we present a quantum field theory of gravity based on spin and scaling gauge symmetries. A biframe spacetime is initiated to describe such a quantum gravity theory. The gravifield sided on both locally flat noncoordinate spacetime and globally flat Minkowski spacetime is an essential ingredient for gauging global spin and scaling symmetries. The locally flat gravifield spacetime spanned by the gravifield is associated with a noncommutative geometry characterized by a gauge-type field strength of the gravifield. A coordinate-independent and gauge-invariant action for the quantum gravity is built in the gravifield basis. In the coordinate basis, we derive equations of motion for all quantum fields including the gravitational effect and obtain basic conservation laws for all symmetries. The equation of motion for the gravifield tensor is deduced in connection directly with the total energy-momentum tensor. When the spin and scaling gauge symmetries are broken down to a background structure that possesses the global Lorentz and scaling symmetries, we obtain exact solutions by solving equations of motion for the background fields in a unitary basis. The massless graviton and massive spinon result as physical quantum degrees of freedom. The resulting Lorentz-invariant and conformally flat background gravifield spacetime is characterized by a cosmic vector with a nonzero cosmological mass scale. The evolving Universe is, in general, not isotropic in terms of conformal proper time. The conformal size of the Universe becomes singular at the cosmological horizon and turns out to be inflationary in light of cosmic proper time. A mechanism for quantum scalinon inflation is demonstrated such that it is the quantum effect that causes the breaking of global scaling symmetry and generates the inflation of the early Universe, which is ended when the evolving vacuum expectation value of the scalar potential gets a minimal. Regarding the gravifield as a Goldstone-like field that transmutes the local spin gauge symmetry into the global Lorentz symmetry with a hidden general coordinate invariance, a spacetime gauge field is constructed from the spin gauge field that becomes a hidden gauge field. The bosonic gravitational interactions are described by the Goldstone-like gravimetric field and spacetime gauge field. Two types of gravity equation result; one is as the extension to Einstein’s equation of general relativity, and the other is a new one that characterizes spinon dynamics. The Einstein theory of general relativity is considered to be an effective low-energy theory.