English

Partial Masslessness and Conformal Gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-11 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Differential Geometry

Abstract

We use conformal, but ghostful, Weyl gravity to study its ghost-free, second derivative, partially massless (PM) spin 2 component in presence of Einstein gravity with positive cosmological constant. Specifically, we consider both gravitational- and self- interactions of PM via the fully non-linear factorization of conformal gravity's Bach tensor into Einstein times Schouten operators. We find that extending PM beyond linear order suffers from familiar higher-spin consistency obstructions: it propagates only in Einstein backgrounds, and the conformal gravity route generates only the usual safe, Noether, cubic order vertices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.1307,
  title  = {Partial Masslessness and Conformal Gravity},
  author = {S. Deser and E. Joung and A. Waldron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.1307},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

19 pages, LaTeX

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:47:07.514Z