Ghosts in massive gravity

By P. Creminelli, Alberto Nicolis, E. Trincherini. 2005

255 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the context of Lorentz-invariant massive gravity we show that classical solutions around heavy sources are plagued by ghost instabilities. The ghost shows up in the effective field theory at huge distances from the source, much bigger than the Vainshtein radius. Its presence is independent of the choice of the non-linear terms added to the Fierz-Pauli lagrangian. At the Vainshtein radius the mass of the ghost is of order of the inverse radius, so that the theory cannot be trusted inside this region, not even at the classical level.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18ff18e8b1749ee87afd2e8dab139bdaf9b9bb6c

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Citations in the corpus

Massive Gravity (2014, background): “motion for π remain at most second order (time) in derivative as was pointed out in [173], (see also [111]).”
Modified Gravity and Cosmology (2011, background): “This mode is often referred to as the Boulware-Deser ghost, and it was believed that one could not find generalisations of the theory that succeeded in eliminating it to all orders [342].”
Helicity decomposition of ghost-free massive gravity (2011, background): “(a) In the decoupling limit: In this limit, AGS showed that the ghost could in principle be pushed beyond the scale Λ5, however shortly after, it was argued that the ghost would inexorably reappear at the scale Λ3, [13].”
A systematic approach to generalisations of General Relativity and their cosmological implications (2018, background): “The attempt by [31] for constructing non-linear interactions of the helicity-0 mode yielded a negative conclusion due to an erroneous decomposition of the massive graviton into its helicity modes.”
Theoretical Aspects of Massive Gravity (2011, methodology): “It is concluded in [101] that the Boulware-Deser ghost is unavoidable, but this conclusion is too quick.”
Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “Despite this progress, massive gravity had another important flaw: all theories seemed to have an additional mode (known as Boulware-Deser (BD) ghost) that renders the theory unstable (Boulware and Deser, 1972; Creminelli et al., 2005).”
Interacting spin-2 fields (2012, unknown): “These theories were arrived at by choosing interaction terms so as to raise the cutoff of the effective theory [4, 5], after which the Boulware-Deser ghost is automatically vanquished.”
Beyond the Cosmological Standard Model (2014, unknown): “To see explicitly that this implies the system secretly has a ghost, we introduce an auxiliary field, χ, as follows [215] L = −(1) 2 (∂ψ)(2) + χ ψ − Λ 2 2 χ(2) − V (ψ) .”