Related papers: Stability of Massive Cosmological Gravitons
We analyze the scalar potentials of maximal gauged three-dimensional supergravities which reveal a surprisingly rich structure. In contrast to maximal supergravities in dimensions D>3, all these theories admit a maximally supersymmetric…
The cosmological evolution of free massless vector or tensor (but not gauge) fields minimally coupled to gravity is analyzed. It is shown that there are some unstable solutions for these fields in De Sitter background. The back reaction of…
We apply the recently developed positivity bounds for particles with spin, applied away from the forward limit, to the low energy effective theories of massive spin-1 and spin-2 theories. For spin-1 theories, we consider the generic Proca…
With no free parameter (except the string scale $M_S$), dynamical flux compactification in Type IIB string theory determines both the cosmological constant (vacuum energy density) $\Lambda$ and the Planck mass $M_P$ in terms of $M_S$, thus…
We consider a massive vector Boson in a static patch of $D$-dimensional de Sitter space (dS$_D$). We argue that this field is controlled by an effective physical (squared) mass $\mu_{\mathrm{v}}^2 = m_{\mathrm{v}}^2 +…
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…
A discussion of the field content of quadratic higher-derivative gravitation is presented, together with a new example of a massless spin-two field consistently coupled to gravity. The full quadratic gravity theory is shown to be equivalent…
Some time ago, we showed that a weak (linear) massless spin 2 wave could only propagate on a Ricci-flat or Ricci-constant background: it must necessarily be a perturbation of General Relativity. This was just the continuation of the higher…
We explore a classical instability of spacetimes of dimension $D>4$. Firstly, we consider static solutions: generalised black holes and brane world metrics. The dangerous mode is a tensor mode on an Einstein base manifold of dimension…
We introduce a large family of homogeneous and isotropic cosmological solutions in quadratic gravity which are singularity-free at early and late times. This kind of smooth solutions only emerges beyond the unstable de Sitter branch…
We propose new massive gravity theories with 5 dynamical degrees of freedom. We evade uniqueness theorems regarding the form of the kinetic and potential terms by adopting the "generalized massive gravity" framework, where a global…
I review recent work on massive higher (s>1) spins in constant curvature (deSitter) spaces. Some of the novel properties that emerge are: partial masslessness and new local gauge invariances, unitarily forbidden ranges of mass, correlation…
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations or tunnel effects; both are difficult to analyze. In this paper we consider the issue from a higher-dimensional perspective. We first look at how stability…
Adding explicit mass terms for the spin 2 and spin 3/2 field of N=1 anti-de Sitter supergravity, the limit M --> 0 for these mass terms is smooth: there is no van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov mass discontinuity in the propagators when the…
In (2+1) space-time dimensions the Einstein theory of gravity has no local degrees of freedom. In fact, in the presence of a negative cosmological term, it is described by a (1+1) dimensional theory living on its boundary: Liouville theory.…
We study linear perturbations around time dependent spherically symmetric solutions in the Lambda_3 massive gravity theory, which self-accelerate in the vacuum. We find that the dynamics of the scalar perturbations depend on the coordinate…
We consider a modified gravity model with a massive graviton, but which nevertheless only propagates two gravitational degrees of freedom and which is free of ghosts. We show that non-singular bouncing cosmological background solutions can…
We derive new positivity bounds at finite momentum transfer, assuming a large separation between the mass $m$ of the lightest particle in the effective theory and the mass gap $M$ to new heavy states. Massive gravity parametrically violates…
We construct the effective field theory for a single massive higher-spin particle in flat spacetime. Positivity bounds of the S-matrix force the cutoff of the theory to be well below the naive strong-coupling scale, forbid any potential and…
Massive bosonic fields of arbitrary spin are predicted by general extensions of the Standard Model. It has been recently shown that there exists a family of bimetric theories of gravity - including massive gravity - which are free of…