Progress in Einstein-Cartan gravity

Abstract

It is well-known that the gravitational force can be obtained by gauging the Lorentz group, which puts gravity on the same footing as the Standard Model fields. The resulting theory - Einstein-Cartan gravity - has several crucial advantages. I will overview the construction of the Weyl-invariant version of this theory and discuss its applications in particle physics and cosmology, in particular for inflation and the strong CP problem.

Comments: Contribution to the book "Open Issues in Gravitation and Cosmology - Original Contributions, Essays and Recollections in Honour of Alexei Starobinsky'', to be published by Springer, edited by Andrei Barvinsky and Alexander Kamenshchik