English

Cubic interactions for massless and partially massless spin-1 and spin-2 fields

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-11-08 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We perform a complete classification of the consistent two-derivative cubic couplings for a system containing an arbitrary number of massless spin-1, massless spin-2, and partially massless (PM) spin-2 fields in DD-dimensional (anti-)de Sitter space. In addition to previously known results, we find a unique candidate mixing between spin-1 and PM spin-2 fields. We derive all the quadratic constraints on the structure constants of the theory, allowing for relative ``wrong-sign'' kinetic terms for any of the fields. In the particular case when the kinetic terms in each sector have no relative signs, we find that the unique consistent non-trivial theory is given by multiple independent copies of conformal gravity coupled to a Yang-Mills sector in D=4D=4. Our results strengthen the well-known no-go theorems on the absence of mutual interactions for massless and PM spin-2 fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.05865,
  title  = {Cubic interactions for massless and partially massless spin-1 and spin-2 fields},
  author = {Nicolas Boulanger and Sebastian Garcia-Saenz and Songsong Pan and Lucas Traina},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.05865},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

26 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:32:46.503Z