We study a gravity model where a tensionful codimension-one threebrane is embedded in a bulk with infinite transverse length. We find that 4D gravity is induced on the brane already at the classical level if we include higher-curvature (Gauss-Bonnet) terms in the bulk. Consistency conditions appear to require a negative brane tension as well as a negative coupling for the higher-curvature terms.

We simulate 4d simplicial gravity for three topologies S, S S and S S S S and show that the free energy for these three xed topology ensembles is the same in the thermodynamic limit N4 !1. We show, that the next-to-leading order corrections, at least away from the critical point, can be described by kinematic sources.

We extend simulations of simplicial gravity in four dimensions to include degenerate triangulations and demonstrate that using this ensemble the geometric finite-size effects are much reduced. We provide strong numerical evidence for the existence of an exponential bound on the entropy of the model and establish that the phase structure is identical to that of a corresponding model restricted t...

We consider 4D quantum-dilaton gravity with the most general coupling in a homogeneous and isotropic universe, especially an inflationary one, which is essentially characterized by an exponentially expanding scale factor with time. We show that on the inflationary background this theory can be miraculously renormalized, at least at the one-loop level, which must be an effective theory during th...

We analyse the classical moduli spaces of supersymmetric vacua of 3d N = 2 Chern-Simons quiver gauge theories. We show quite generally that the moduli space of the 3d theory always contains a baryonic branch of a parent 4d N = 1 quiver gauge theory, where the 4d baryonic branch is determined by the vector of 3d Chern-Simons levels. In particular, starting with a 4d quiver theory dual to a 3-fol...