Related papers: Bottom-up approach to massive spin-two theory in a…
We study dynamics of Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) spacetime based on the ghost-free bigravity theory. Assuming the coupling parameters guaranteeing the existence of de Sitter space as well as Minkowski spacetime, we find two…
Self-interacting massive particles with spin $\geq 1$ unavoidably violate unitarity; the question is at what scale. For spin-$1$ the strong coupling scale (at which perturbative unitarity is lost) cannot be raised by any finite tuning of…
We construct Lorentz-invariant massless/massive spin-2 theories in flat spacetime. Starting from the most generic action of a rank-2 symmetric tensor field whose Lagrangian contains up to quadratic in first derivatives of a field, we…
This Ph.D. thesis investigates effective field and string theories in which supersymmetry is realized and broken in various ways. Chapter 1 addresses effective theories with nonlinearly realized supersymmetry, constructed using the…
We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them…
We show that the coupling of a massive spin-2 field to undeformed N=1 supergravity in four dimensions is unique, leading to a specific non-minimal coupling to the Riemann tensor. The massive spin-2 coupling reproduces the one of an…
We revisit and extend the `Effective field theory for massive gravitons' constructed by Arkani-Hamed, Georgi and Schwartz in the light of recent progress in constructing ghost-free theories with multiple interacting spin-2 fields. We show…
In the first part of this work we show the decoupling (up to contact terms) of redundant degrees of freedom which appear in the covariant description of spin two massive particles in $D=2+1$. We make use of a master action which…
In the context of massive (bi-)gravity non-minimal matter couplings have been proposed. These couplings are special in the sense that they are free of the Boulware-Deser ghost below the strong coupling scale and can be used consistently as…
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 consider a recently proposed non-minimal matter coupling in massive gravity and multi-gravity. We argue that, when formulated in terms of unconstrained vielbeins, this matter coupling contains the primary constraints necessary to remove…
The Hamiltonian analysis for $f(T)$ gravity implies the existence of at least one scalar-type degree of freedom (DoF). However, this scalar DoF of $f(T)$ gravity does not manifest in linear perturbations around a cosmological background,…
Recently, the construction of ghost-free nonlinear massive spin-2 interactions solved a long outstanding problem in classical field theory. The consistent formulation requires a second rank-two tensor (or metric) and therefore has the form…
Some phantom cosmological models without big rip singularity have been constructed in a simple extended theory of gravity. In the geometrical part of the action, a minimally coupled linear function of the Ricci Scalar and the trace of the…
We prove the generalized second law (GSL) for higher curvature gravity theories when the matter sector is non-minimally coupled. The validity of our proof is in the regime of linearized fluctuations about equilibrium black holes, which is…
We show that the equations of motion for (free) integer higher spin gauge fields can be formulated as twisted self-duality conditions on the higher spin curvatures of the spin-$s$ field and its dual. We focus on the case of four spacetime…
We analyze the first-order formulation of the ghost-free bigravity model in three-dimensions known as zwei-dreibein gravity. For a special choice of parameters, it was argued to have an additional gauge symmetry and give rise to a partially…
We consider a particular set of ghost-free interactions for three spin-2 fields in which we freeze out the dynamics of the metric tensor that couples to the matter sector. Integrating out the non-dynamical degrees of freedom in vacuum…
We extend the notion of the Higuchi bound and partial masslessness to ghost-free nonlinear bimetric theories. This can be achieved in a simple way by first considering linear massive spin-2 perturbations around maximally symmetric…
The construction of dual theories for linearized gravity in four dimensions is considered. Our approach is based on the parent Lagrangian method previously developed for the massive spin-two case, but now considered for the zero mass case.…