nLab gravitational instanton

Idea

The analog of Yang-Mills instantons in gravity (…)

Related concepts

• Yang-Mills instanton

• Kaluza-Klein monopole

• Taub-NUT spacetime

• exotic sphere

References

The original articles:

• Tohru Eguchi, Peter Freund, Quantum Gravity and World Topology, Phys. Rev. Lett. 37 (1967) 1251 [doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.37.1251]

• Alexander Belavin, D. Burlankov, The renormalisable theory of gravitation and the Einstein equations, Physics Letters A Volume 58, Issue 1, 26 July 1976, Pages 7-8 (doi:10.1016/0375-9601(76)90530-2)

• Tohru Eguchi, Andrew Hanson, Gravitational instantons, General Relativity and Gravitation volume 11, pages 315–320 (1979) (doi:10.1007/BF00759271)

Review:

• Tohru Eguchi, Peter Gilkey, Andrew Hanson, Section 10.2 of: Gravitation, gauge theories and differential geometry, Physics Reports 66 6 (1980) 213-393 [doi:10.1016/0370-1573(80)90130-1]

See also

• Wikipedia, Gravitational instanton

On gravitational instanton number counted by first Pontrjagin class:

• Eguchi-Freund 67, around (1)

• Belavin-Burlankov 76

• Serdar Nergiz, Cihan Saclioglum, equation (27) in: A Quasiperiodic Gibbons–Hawking Metric and Spacetime Foam, Phys. Rev. D 53, 2240 (1996) (arXiv:hep-th/9505141)

Argument that exotic spheres may be regarded as gravitational instantons:

• Edward Witten, p. 12 of: Global gravitational anomalies, Comm. Math. Phys. Volume 100, Number 2 (1985), 197–229. (EUCLID)

• Randy A. Baadhio, On the global gravitational instanton and soliton that are homotopy spheres, Journal of Mathematical Physics 32, 2869 (1991) (doi:10.1063/1.529078)