English

Massive higher spin fields in curved spacetime and necessity of non-minimal couplings

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-07-01 v3

Abstract

Free massive higher spin fields in weak background gravitational fields are discussed. Contrary to the spin one case, higher spin fields should have nontrivial non-minimal couplings to the curvature. A precise analysis is given for the spin 2 case, and it is shown that two conditions should be satisfied among five non-minimal coupling constants, which we derive both in the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formalisms. It is checked that the linearized limit of the massive gravity theory indeed has the non-minimal couplings that satisfy the conditions. We also discuss the form of the non-minimal couplings for the spin 3 case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.03363,
  title  = {Massive higher spin fields in curved spacetime and necessity of non-minimal couplings},
  author = {Masafumi Fukuma and Hikaru Kawai and Katsuta Sakai and Junji Yamamoto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.03363},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

19 pages; discussion on spin 3 added, references added (v2); footnote 9 corrected (v3)