2006/10/31 by Stefan Groot Nibbelink, Marco Peloso, Matthew G. Sexton +1 · 53 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gravitation #Graviton #Lorentz covariance #Lorentz transformation #Massive gravity #Massless particle #Mathematical physics #Minkowski space #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scale invariance #Theoretical physics #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-007-0311-x
published in The European Physical Journal C 51(3) (Springer Science+Business Media) · 23+1 pages LaTeX, 3 figures, few typos corrected
arxiv created 2007/04/30 · openalex publication_date 2007/05/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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 constant if the external background is formally sent to zero. Such a term and the explicit external background, emerge dynamically from a bi--gravity theory, having both a massless and a massive graviton in its spectrum, in a specific limit in which the massless mode decouples, while the massive one couples universally to matter. We investigate the massive theory using the Stueckelberg method and providing a 't Hooft-Feynman gauge fixing in which the tensor, vector and scalar Stueckelberg fields decouple. We show that this model has the softest possible ultraviolet behavior which can be expected from any generic (Lorentz invariant) theory of massive gravity, namely that it becomes strong only at the scale Lambda3 = (mg2 MP)1/3.