Speaker
Description
I will explore extended theories of gravity that include topological terms, focusing on how symmetry principles can be used to identify physically viable models. Symmetries provide a natural criterion for selecting and constraining the allowed gravitational actions and they also play a central role in shaping the underlying geometric and topological structure of spacetime. By employing these criteria, one can simplify the cosmological field equations and formulate the problem within the ADM formalism, paving the way toward a quantum cosmology framework. Interestingly, the same symmetry arguments that guide the selection of the theories can also be shown to generate or constrain the topological invariants themselves. This symmetry–topology interplay offers a unified perspective for studying both the classical and quantum aspects of modified gravitational dynamics.
