Related papers: Ghost-Free Derivative Interactions for a Massive G…
We present a second order gravity action which consists of ordinary Einstein action augmented by a first-order, vector like, Chern-Simons quasi topological term.This theory is ghost-free and propagates a pure spin-2 mode. It is…
More than three decades ago quadratic gravity was found to present a perturbative, renormalizable and asymptotically free theory of quantum gravity. Unfortunately the theory appeared to have problems with a spin-2 ghost. In this essay we…
We propose an algebraic analysis using a 3+1 decomposition to identify conditions for a clever cancellation of the higher derivatives, which plagued the theory with Ostrogradsky ghosts, by exploiting some existing degeneracy in the…
The fundamental field equations in modified gravity (including general relativity; massive and bimetric theories; Ho\vrava-Lifshits, HL; Einstein--Finsler gravity extensions etc) posses an important decoupling property with respect to…
It is well-known that the presence of a spacetime boundary requires the conventional Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action to be supplemented by the Gibbons-Hawking (GH) boundary term in order to retain the standard variational procedure. When the…
Certain scalar fields with higher derivative interactions and novel classical and quantum mechanical properties - the Galileons - can be naturally covariantized by coupling to nonlinear massive gravity in such a way that their symmetries…
Under the hypotheses of smoothness of the interactions in the coupling constant, locality, Poincare invariance, Lorentz covariance, and the preservation of the number of derivatives on each field in the Lagrangian of the interacting theory…
The basic building block for Lorentz invariant and ghost free massive gravity is the square root of the combination $g^{-1}\eta\,$, where $g^{-1}$ is the inverse of the physical metric and $\eta$ is a reference metric. Since the square root…
We propose two new versions of ghost-free generalized $F(R)$ gravity with Lagrange multiplier constraint. The first version of such theory for a particular degenerate choice of the Lagrange multiplier, corresponds to mimetic $F(R)$ gravity.…
We show how the pseudo-linear interactions for spin-2 particles can be straightforwardly extended to include multiple massive and massless fields without introducing ghosts. When massive spin-2 fields are included, these give simple…
A theory with the action combining the Einstein--Hilbert term and graviton mass terms violating Lorentz invariance is considered at linearized level about Minkowskian background. It is shown that with one of the masses set equal to zero,…
We construct the consistent ghost-free covariant scalar-vector-tensor gravity theories with second order equations of motion with derivative interactions. We impose locality, unitarity, Lorentz invariance and pseudo-Riemannian geometry as…
Bigravity is a natural arena where a non-linear theory of massive gravity can be formulated. If the interaction between the metrics $f$ and $g$ is non-derivative, spherically symmetric exact solutions can be found. At large distances from…
Canonical analysis of a recently proposed [1] linear+quadratic curvature gravity model in D=3 displays its pure fourth derivative quadratic branch as a ghost-free (massless) excitation. Hence it both negates an old no-go theorem and is…
A ghost free massive deformation of unimodular gravity (UG), in the spirit of {\em mimetic massive gravity}, is shown to exist. This construction avoids the no-go theorem for a Fierz-Pauli type of mass term in UG by giving up on Lorentz…
In de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) massive gravity and bigravity, a non-minimal matter coupling involving both metrics generically re-introduces the Boulware--Deser (BD) ghost. A non-minimal matter coupling via a simple, yet specific…
We present the details of the novel framework for Lagrangian field theories that are Lorentz-invariant and lead to at most second order equations of motion. The use of antisymmetric structure is of crucial importance. The general ghost-free…
This note is devoted to the Hamiltonian analysis of extension of quasidilaton massive gravity as was proposed recently in [arXiv:1306.5502]. We show that for given formulation of the theory the additional primary constraint that is…
In massive gravity and in bimetric theories of gravity, two constraints are needed to eliminate the two phase-space degrees of freedom of the Boulware-Deser ghost. For recently proposed non-linear theories, a Hamiltonian constraint has been…
We argue that theories with ghosts may have a long lived vacuum state even if all interactions are Lorentz preserving. In space-time dimension D = 2, we consider the tree level decay rate of the vacuum into ghosts and ordinary particles…