English

Bimetric gravity is cosmologically viable

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2015-07-07 v4 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Bimetric theory describes gravitational interactions in the presence of an extra spin-2 field. Previous work has suggested that its cosmological solutions are generically plagued by instabilities. We show that by taking the Planck mass for the second metric, MfM_f, to be small, these instabilities can be pushed back to unobservably early times. In this limit, the theory approaches general relativity with an effective cosmological constant which is, remarkably, determined by the spin-2 interaction scale. This provides a late-time expansion history which is extremely close to Λ\LambdaCDM, but with a technically-natural value for the cosmological constant. We find MfM_f should be no larger than the electroweak scale in order for cosmological perturbations to be stable by big-bang nucleosynthesis. We further show that in this limit the helicity-0 mode is no longer strongly-coupled at low energy scales.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.07521,
  title  = {Bimetric gravity is cosmologically viable},
  author = {Yashar Akrami and S. F. Hassan and Frank Könnig and Angnis Schmidt-May and Adam R. Solomon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07521},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

8+2 pages, 2 tables. Version published in PLB. Minor typo corrections from v3

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:02:19.548Z