English

Absence of a Vainshtein radius in torsion bigravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-03-18 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

It was pointed out long ago by Vainshtein [Phys. Lett. 39B, 393 (1972)] that the weak-field perturbation expansion of generic theories (of the nonlinear Fierz-Pauli type) involving massive spin-2 excitations breaks down below a certain distance around a material source ("Vainshtein radius"), scaling as some inverse power of the spin-2 mass m2m_2, i.e., some positive power of the range m21m_2^{-1}. Here we prove that this conclusion does not apply in a generalized Einstein-Cartan theory (called "torsion bigravity") whose spectrum is made (like that of bimetric gravity) of a massless spin-2 excitation and a massive spin-2 one. Working within a static spherically symmetric ansatz, we prove, by reformulating the field equations in terms of new variables, that one can construct an all-order weak-field perturbative expansion where no denominators involving m2m_2 ever appear in the region rm21r \ll m_2^{-1}. In particular, we show how the formal large-range limit, m20m_2 \to 0, leads to a well-defined, finite perturbation expansion, whose all-order structure is discussed in some detail.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.07148,
  title  = {Absence of a Vainshtein radius in torsion bigravity},
  author = {Vasilisa Nikiforova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07148},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

18 pages, no figures