Related papers: Unimodular gravity and general relativity from gra…
Unimodular gravity is a compelling modified theory of gravity that offers a natural solution to the cosmological constant problem. However, for unimodular gravity to be considered a viable theory of gravity, one has to show that it has a…
We consider a theory of scalars minimally coupled to an auxiliary background metric. The theory is generally covariant and subject to the constraint of vanishing energy-momentum tensor. Eliminating the auxiliary metric leads to a…
Unimodular gravity is an interesting approach to address the cosmological constant problem, since the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate in this framework, and the cosmological constant appears as an integration…
We examine the role of consistency with causality and quantum mechanics in determining the properties of gravitation. We begin by examining two different classes of interacting theories of massless spin 2 particles -- gravitons. One…
The so-called unimodular version of General Relativity is revisited. Unimodular gravity is constructed by fixing the determinant of the metric, what leads to the trace-free part of the equations instead of the usual Einstein field…
A thorough study and analysis on the conceptual foundations of unimodular gravity shows that this theory is essentially general relativity disguised as unimodular relativity in the literature. The main reason for this dilemma is accepting…
We combine the unimodular gravity and mimetic gravity theories into a unified theoretical framework, which is proposed to provide a suggestive proposal for a framework that may assist in the discussion and solution search of the…
We investigate a possible unified theory of all interactions which is based only on fundamental spinor fields. The vielbein and metric arise as composite objects. The effective quantum gravitational theory can lead to a modification of…
We construct explicitly deformations of Einstein's theory of gravity that are consistent and phenomenologically viable since they respect, in particular, cosmological backgrounds. We show that these deformations have unique symmetries in…
We study the Hamiltonian structure of unimodular-like theories, where the cosmological constant (or other supposed constants of nature) are demoted from fixed parameters to classical constants of motion. No new local degrees of freedom are…
We investigate, in any spacetime dimension >=3, the problem of consistent couplings for a finite collection of massless, spin-2 fields described, in the free limit, by a sum of Pauli-Fierz actions. We show that there is no consistent…
The principles of quantum field theory in flat spacetime suggest that gravity is mediated by a massless particle with helicity $\pm2$, the so-called graviton. It is regarded as textbook knowledge that, when the self-coupling of a particle…
An effective theory of gravity in the infrared is proposed, which involves the determinant of the metric relative to the determinant of a prior metric taken to be that of Minkowski spacetime. This effective theory can be interpreted as a…
Recently, a gauge theory of unified gravity [Rep. Prog. Phys. 88, 057802 (2025)] has been developed to extend the Standard Model to include gravity. Here we present unified gravity using the ordinary four-vector and tensor field notation of…
Just like the vector bosons in Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories, gravitons can attain mass by spontaneous local symmetry breaking. The question is whether this can happen in a Lorentz-invariant way. We consider the use of four scalar…
It is generally believed that coupling the graviton (a classical Fierz-Pauli massless spin-2 field) to its own energy-momentum tensor successfully recreates the dynamics of the Einstein field equations order by order; however the validity…
A generalization to the theory of massive gravity is presented which includes three dynamical metrics. It is shown that at the linear level, the theory predicts a massless spin-2 field which is decoupled from the other two gravitons which…
The configuration space of general relativity is superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics modulo diffeomorphisms. However, it has been argued that the configuration space for gravity should be conformal superspace - the space of…
In a recent paper [1], it was introduced a new class of gravitational theories with two local degrees of freedom. The existence of these theories apparently challenges the distinctive role of general relativity as the unique non-linear…
A four-dimensional ${\rm SU}(4)$ confining Yang-Mills field, coupled to a fundamental fermion field and a bi-fundamental scalar field, has excitations with spin-2, but no other quantum numbers. These spin-2 excitations can be light or can…