English

Massive gravity from bimetric gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2012-12-06 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We discuss the subtle relationship between massive gravity and bimetric gravity, focusing particularly on the manner in which massive gravity may be viewed as a suitable limit of bimetric gravity. The limiting procedure is more delicate than currently appreciated. Specifically, this limiting procedure should not unnecessarily constrain the background metric, which must be externally specified by the theory of massive gravity itself. The fact that in bimetric theories one always has two sets of metric equations of motion continues to have an effect even in the massive gravity limit, leading to additional constraints besides the one set of equations of motion naively expected. Thus, since solutions of bimetric gravity in the limit of vanishing kinetic term are also solutions of massive gravity, but the contrary statement is not necessarily true, there is not complete continuity in the parameter space of the theory. In particular, we study the massive cosmological solutions which are continuous in the parameter space, showing that many interesting cosmologies belong to this class.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.2158,
  title  = {Massive gravity from bimetric gravity},
  author = {Valentina Baccetti and Prado Martin-Moruno and Matt Visser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.2158},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

v1: 25 pages; v2: 6 references added, discussion streamlined; v3: 24 pages, 20 references added, section 2 summarized, new comments added to section 3, conclusions improved but unchanged. This version accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravity

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:01:17.034Z