Null propagation of partially massless higher spins in (A)dS and cosmological constant speculations

By S. Deser, A. Waldron. 2001

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show explicitly that all partially and strictly massless fields with spins s⩽3 in (A)dS have null propagation. Assuming that this property holds also for s>3, we derive the mass-cosmological constant tunings required to yield all higher spin partially massless theories. As s increases, the unitarily allowed region for massive spins is squeezed around Λ=0, so that an infinite tower of massive particles forces vanishing Λ. We also speculate on the relevance of this result to string theory and supergravity in (A)dS backgrounds.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f087e337b3cd406247a03cf52634c8f07421677

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Citations in the corpus

Massive Gravity (2014, background): “This special case is another point in parameter space where the helicity-0 mode could be decoupled, corresponding to a partially massless (PM) theory of gravity as first pointed out by Deser and Waldron [190, 189, 188], (see also [500] for partially massless higher spin, and [450] for related studie”
Theoretical Aspects of Massive Gravity (2011, background): “lagrangian (5.2) with the mass (5.14) has the gauge symmetry h = r r + 1 D 2 m2g ; (5.15) where (x) is a scalar gauge parameter. The theory at the value (5.14) is called partially massless [73,74,75,76,77]. Due to the gauge symmetry (5.15), this theory propagates one fewer degree of freedom than us”
Cosmological stability bound in massive gravity and bigravity (2013, background): “This is known as the partially massless graviton [62–75].”