Black hole and cosmological analysis of BF sequestered gravity

Abstract

We study a minimal extension of a recently proposed modification of general relativity that draws on concepts from topological field theory to resolve aspects of the cosmological constant problem. In the original model, the field content of general relativity was augmented to include a gauge field and an adjoint-valued two-form without modifying the classical gravitational dynamics. Here we include a kinetic term for the gauge field which sources fluctuations of the cosmological constant. We then study spherically symmetric black holes and a simple homogeneous, isotropic cosmological model predicted by the extended theory. For the black hole case, we observe deviations near the event horizon as well as a ``charge"-like behavior induced by the gauge field. In the cosmological case, $\dot{H}$ is always positive and some solutions asymptote to a constant $H$.