English

Cosmological perturbations in Massive Gravity and the Higuchi bound

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-05 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In de Sitter spacetime there exists an absolute minimum for the mass of a spin-2 field set by the Higuchi bound m^2 \geq 2H^2. We generalize this bound to arbitrary spatially flat FRW geometries in the context of the recently proposed ghost-free models of Massive Gravity with an FRW reference metric, by performing a Hamiltonian analysis for cosmological perturbations. We find that the bound generically indicates that spatially flat FRW solutions in FRW massive gravity, which exhibit a Vainshtein mechanism in the background as required by consistency with observations, imply that the helicity zero mode is a ghost. In contradistinction to previous works, the tension between the Higuchi bound and the Vainshtein mechanism is equally strong regardless of the equation of state for matter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1206.3852,
  title  = {Cosmological perturbations in Massive Gravity and the Higuchi bound},
  author = {Matteo Fasiello and Andrew J. Tolley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.3852},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

24 pages, typos and conventions corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:21:05.279Z