2020/05/31 by Mark P. Hertzberg, Jacob A. Litterer, McCullen Sandora · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Electromagnetism #General relativity #Gravitation #Graviton #Homogeneous space #Lorentz covariance #Lorentz transformation #Massive gravity #Mathematics #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.102.025023
published as Phys. Rev. D 102, 025023 (2020) · 13 pages in double column format. V2 further clarification and fixed some typos. V3: Further clarifications, including mass terms. Updated towards version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D, including journal title format
openalex publication_date 2020/07/30 · arxiv created 2020/08/11 · arxiv updated 2020/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
It is known that local, Lorentz invariant, unitary theories involving particles with spin 1 demand that the matter sector they couple to are organized by internal physical symmetries and the associated charge conservation, while spin 3/2 demands supersymmetry. However, the introduction of a spin 2 graviton does not obviously demand new symmetries of the matter sector (although it does demand a universal coupling). In this work we relax the assumption of Lorentz boost symmetry, while maintaining a basic notion of locality that there is no instantaneous signaling at a distance. This extends and complements our accompanying work in Part 1 on related issues for spin 1 particles in electromagnetism. In order to avoid potential problems with longitudinal modes of the graviton, we choose to project them out, leaving only two degrees of freedom. We study large classes of theories that a priori may violate Lorentz boost invariance. By requiring the tree-level exchange action be local, we find that consistency demands that the Lorentz boost symmetry must be satisfied by the graviton and the matter sector, and in turn we recover general relativity at this order of analysis.