English

Non-local massive gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-11-08 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We present a general covariant action for massive gravity merging together a class of "non-polynomial" and super-renormalizable or finite theories of gravity with the non-local theory of gravity recently proposed by Jaccard, Maggiore and Mitsou (Phys. Rev. D 88 (2013) 044033). Our diffeomorphism invariant action gives rise to the equations of motion appearing in non-local massive massive gravity plus quadratic curvature terms. Not only the massive graviton propagator reduces smoothly to the massless one without a vDVZ discontinuity, but also our finite theory of gravity is unitary at tree level around the Minkowski background. We also show that, as long as the graviton mass mm is much smaller the today's Hubble parameter H0H_0, a late-time cosmic acceleration can be realized without a dark energy component due to the growth of a scalar degree of freedom. In the presence of the cosmological constant Λ\Lambda, the dominance of the non-local mass term leads to a kind of "degravitation" for Λ\Lambda at the late cosmological epoch.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.6968,
  title  = {Non-local massive gravity},
  author = {Leonardo Modesto and Shinji Tsujikawa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.6968},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:58:16.703Z