Stabilization of Linear Higher Derivative Gravity with Constraints

We show that the instabilities of higher derivative gravity models with quadratic curvature invariant $\alpha R^2+\beta R_{\mu\nu}R^{\mu\nu}$ can be removed by judicious addition of constraints at the quadratic level of metric fluctuations around Minkowski/de Sitter background. With a suitable parameter choice, we find that the instabilities of helicity-0, 1, 2 modes can be removed while reducing the dimensionality of the original phase space. To retain the renormalization properties of higher derivative gravity, Lorentz symmetry in the constrained theory is explicitly broken.