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The gravitational lensing effect is important to the detection of electromagnetic signals in astrophysics. The gravitational wave lensing effect has also been found significant to gravitational wave detection in the past decade. Recent analysis shows that the lensing events for advanced detectors could be quite plausible. The black holes in our Milky Way Galaxy may play the role of lens objects. These facts motivate us to study the lensing effects on gravitational wave signals for advanced detectors. Taking advanced LIGO and Einstein Telescope for examples, we investigate the lensing effects on the parameter extraction of gravitational wave signals. Using the Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation together with matched filtering methods, we find that the lensing effect for a lens object with small mass is negligible. But when the mass of the lens object increases to larger than 1000M(circle dot) the lensing effect becomes important. Using the template without lensing corrections would result in loss of signal detections. In contrast if we consider templates with lensing effects, the lensed signal may provide much information about the lens black hole. These facts may give us a new way to determine the parameters of the lensing object. For example, this kind of signal may also help us estimate the mass and the distance of the supermassive black hole hosted at the center of our Galaxy.

We study the Wilson line response in the holographic superconducting phase transitions in Gauss-Bonnet gravity. In the black brane background case, the Little-Parks periodicity is independent of the Gauss-Bonnet parameter, while in the AdS soliton case, there is no evidence for the Little-Parks periodicity. We further study the impact of the Gauss-Bonnet term on the holographic phase transitions quantitatively. The results show that such quantum corrections can effectively affect the occurrence of the phase transitions and the response to the Wilson line., 19 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, references added

A well-motivated extension of higher order holonomy corrections in loop quantum cosmology (LQC) for the k=0 Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model is investigated at the level of heuristic effective dynamics. It reveals that the quantum bounce is generic, regardless of the order of corrections, and the matter density remains finite, bounded from above by an upper bound in the regime of the Planckian density, even if all orders of corrections are included. This observation provides further evidence that the quantum bounce is essentially a consequence of the loopy nature (i.e. intrinsic discreteness) of LQC and LQC is fundamentally different from the Wheeler-DeWitt theory; it also encourages one to construct the quantum theory of LQC with the higher order holonomy corrections, which might be understood as related to the higher j representations in the Hamiltonian operator of loop quantum gravity.

Wormhole and time machine are very interesting objects in general relativity. However, they need exotic matters which are impossible in classical level to support them. But if we introduce the quantum effects of gravity into the stress-energy tensor, these peculiar objects can be constructed self-consistently. Fortunately, loop quantum cosmology (LQC) has the potential to serve as a bridge connecting the classical theory and quantum gravity. Therefore it provides a simple way for the study of quantum effect in the semiclassical case. As is well known, loop quantum cosmology is very successful to deal with the behavior of early universe. In the early stage, if taken the quantum effect into consideration, inflation is natural because of the violation of every kind of local energy conditions. Similar to the inflationary universe, the violation of the averaged null energy condition is the necessary condition for the traversable wormholes. In this paper, we investigate the averaged null energy condition in LQC in the framework of effective Hamiltonian, and find out that LQC do violate the averaged null energy condition in the massless scalar field coupled model., 5 pages