The Higgs-dilaton cosmological model is able to describe simultaneously an inflationary expansion in the early Universe and a dark energy dominated stage responsible for the present day acceleration. It also leads to a nontrivial relation between the spectral tilt of scalar perturbations ${n}_{s}$ and the dark energy equation of state $$\omega${}$. We study the self-consistency of this model from an effective field theory point of view. Taking into account the influence of the dynamical background fields, we determine the effective cutoff of the theory, which turns out to be parametrically larger than all the relevant energy scales from inflation to the present epoch. We finally formulate the set of assumptions needed to estimate the amplitude of the quantum corrections in a systematic way and show that the connection between ${n}_{s}$ and $$\omega${}$ remains unaltered if these assumptions are satisfied.

We study the geometrical properties of scale-invariant two-field models of inflation. In particular, we show that when the field-derivative space in the Einstein frame is maximally symmetric during inflation, the inflationary predictions can be universal and independent of the details of the theory

We derive a novel four-dimensional black hole with planar horizon that asymptotes to the linear dilaton background. The usual growth of its entanglement entropy before Page’s time is established. After that, emergent islands modify to a large extent the entropy, which becomes finite and is saturated by its Bekenstein-Hawking value in accordance with the finiteness of the von Neumann entropy of eternal black holes. We demonstrate that viewed from the string frame, our solution is the two-dimensional Witten black hole with two additional free bosons. We generalize our findings by considering a general class of linear dilaton black hole solutions at a generic point along theσ-model renormalization group (RG) equations. For those, we observe that the entanglement entropy is “running” i.e. it is changing along the RG flow with respect to the two-dimensional worldsheet length scale. At any fixed moment before Page’s time the aforementioned entropy increases towards the infrared (IR) domain, whereas the presence of islands leads the running entropy to decrease towards the IR at later times. Finally, we present a four-dimensional charged black hole that asymptotes to the linear dilaton background as well. We compute the associated entanglement entropy for the extremal case and we find that an island is needed in order for it to follow the Page curve.

In this note we show that given a conformally invariant theory in flat space-time, it is not always possible to couple it to gravity in a Weyl invariant way

In the present paper, we revisit gravitational theories which are invariant under TDiffs—transverse (volume-preserving) diffeomorphisms and global scale transformations. It is known that these theories can be rewritten in an equivalent diffeomorphism-invariant form with an action including an integration constant (cosmological constant for the particular case of non-scale-invariant unimodular gravity). The presence of this integration constant, in general, breaks explicitly scale invariance and induces a runaway potential for the (otherwise massless) dilaton, associated with the determinant of the metric tensor. We show, however, that if the metric carries mass dimension ${[\mathrm{GeV}]}^{-2}$, the scale invariance of the system is preserved, unlike the situation in theories in which the metric has mass dimension different from $-2$. The dilaton remains massless and couples to other fields only through derivatives, without any conflict with observations. We observe that one can define a specific limit for fields and their derivatives (in particular, the dilaton goes to zero, potentially related to the small distance domain of the theory) in which the only singular terms in the action correspond to the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant. We speculate that the self-consistency of the theory may require the regularity of the action, leading to the absence of the bare Higgs mass and cosmological constant, whereas their small finite values may be generated by nonperturbative effects.

We study scalar, fermionic and gauge fields coupled nonminimally to gravity in the Einstein-Cartan formulation. We construct a wide class of models with nondynamical torsion whose gravitational spectra comprise only the massless graviton. Eliminating nonpropagating degrees of freedom, we derive an equivalent theory in the metric formulation of gravity. It features contact interactions of a certain form between, and among, the matter and gauge currents. We also discuss briefly the inclusion of curvature-squared terms.