Related papers: Vielbein to the Rescue?
We propose a non-linear extension of the Fierz-Pauli mass for the graviton through a functional of the vielbein and an external Minkowski background. The functional generalizes the notion of the measure, since it reduces to a cosmological…
Coupling the galileons to a curved background has been a tradeoff between maintaining second order equations of motion, maintaining the galilean shift symmetries, and allowing the background metric to be dynamical. We propose a construction…
Bimetric gravity is a ghost-free and observationally viable extension of general relativity, exhibiting both a massless and a massive graviton. The observed abundances of light elements can be used to constrain the expansion history of the…
In this work, we present novel analytical solutions for static and spherically symmetric wormhole geometries threaded by an anisotropic distribution of matter conformally coupled to a scalar ghost field. We explore the main features of the…
We study 3D Anti de Sitter Minimal Massive Gravity in two regimes: a) at the chiral limit where one of the boundary Brown-Henneaux central charges vanishes and two modes become null and b) in the regime that one of the two charges is much…
In the context of Lorentz-invariant massive gravity we show that classical solutions around heavy sources are plagued by ghost instabilities. The ghost shows up in the effective field theory at huge distances from the source, much bigger…
A quantum theory of massive Abelian vector bosons with non-minimal couplings to gravity has been studied within an evolving, isotropic, and homogeneous gravitational background. The vectors may play a role of dark matter if stabilizing…
A BV algebra is a formal framework within which the BV quantization algorithm is implemented. In addition to the gauge symmetry, encoded in the BV master equation, the master action often exhibits further global symmetries, which may be in…
We constrain theories of a massive spin-2 particle coupled to a massless spin-2 particle by demanding the absence of a time advance in eikonal scattering. This is an $S$-matrix consideration that leads to model-independent constraints on…
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…
The cosmological constant problem and the compatibility of gravity with quantum mechanics are the two most pressing problems in all of gravitational theory. While string theory nicely addresses the latter, it has so far failed to provide…
We revisit the problem of the helicity-0 ghost mode of massive graviton in the de Sitter background. In general, the presence of a ghost particle, which has negative energy, drives the vacuum to be unstable through pair production of ghost…
We consider a renormalizable two-dimensional model of dilaton gravity coupled to a set of conformal fields as a toy model for quantum cosmology. We discuss the cosmological solutions of the model and study the effect of including the…
We introduce the Vainshtein mechanism which plays a crucial role in massive gravities, as well as in related theories such as Galileons and their extensions. This mechanism, also known as k-mouflage, allows to hide via non linear effects -…
We show that in a large class of two dimensional models with conformal matter fields, the semiclassical cosmological solutions have a weak coupling singularity if the classical matter content is below a certain threshold. This threshold and…
Understanding the role of higher derivatives is probably one of the most relevant questions in quantum gravity theory. Already at the semiclassical level, when gravity is a classical background for quantum matter fields, the action of…
Theories with curvature squared terms in the action are known to contain ghost modes in general. However, if we regard curvature squared terms as quantum corrections to the original theory, the emergence of ghosts may be simply due to the…
The ghost-free bimetric theory describes interactions of gravity with another spin-2 field in terms of two Lorentzian metrics. However, if the two metrics do not admit compatible notions of space and time, the formulation of the initial…
General Relativity enjoys the freedom of different geometrical interpretations in terms of curvature, torsion or non-metricity. Within this geometrical trinity, a simpler geometrical formulation of General Relativity manifests itself in the…
We have proposed a new ghost-free model with interactions of massive spin two particles in Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 90} (2014) 043006 [arXiv:1402.5737 [hep-th]]. Although the model is ghost-free on the Minkowski space-time, it is not obvious…