Covariant Galileon
High Energy Physics - Theory
2009-10-07 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
We consider the recently introduced "galileon" field in a dynamical spacetime. When the galileon is assumed to be minimally coupled to the metric, we underline that both field equations of the galileon and the metric involve up to third-order derivatives. We show that a unique nonminimal coupling of the galileon to curvature eliminates all higher derivatives in all field equations, hence yielding second-order equations, without any extra propagating degree of freedom. The resulting theory breaks the generalized "Galilean" invariance of the original model.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0901.1314,
title = {Covariant Galileon},
author = {C. Deffayet and G. Esposito-Farese and A. Vikman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.1314},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, no figure, RevTeX4 format; v2 adds footnote 1, Ref. [12], reformats the link in Ref. [14], and corrects very minor typos