English

When is Multimetric Gravity Ghost-free?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-05-30 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study ghosts in multimetric gravity by combining the mini-superspace and the Hamiltonian constraint analysis. We first revisit bimetric gravity and explain why it is ghost-free. Then, we apply our method to trimetric gravity and clarify when the model contains a ghost. More precisely, we prove trimetric gravity generically contains a ghost. However, if we cut the interaction of a pair of metrics, trimetric gravity becomes ghost-free. We further extend the Hamiltonian analysis to general multimetric gravity and calculate the number of ghosts in various models. Thus, we find multimetric gravity with loop type interactions never becomes ghost-free.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.3637,
  title  = {When is Multimetric Gravity Ghost-free?},
  author = {Kouichi Nomura and Jiro Soda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.3637},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

22 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:36:10.448Z