RT Journal Article
T1 Unimodular gravity and general relativity from graviton self-interactions
A1 Barceló, Carlos
A1 Carballo Rubio, Raúl
A1 Garay Elizondo, Luis Javier
AB It is commonly accepted that general relativity is the only solution to the consistency problem that appears when trying to build a theory of interacting gravitons (massless spin-2 particles). Padmanabhan’s 2008 thought-provoking analysis raised some concerns that are having resonance in the community. In this paper we present the self-coupling problem in detail and explicitly solve the infinite-iterations scheme associated with it for the simplest theory of a graviton field, which corresponds to an irreducible spin-2 representation of the Poincaré group. We make explicit the nonuniqueness problem by finding an entirefamily of solutions to the self-coupling problem. Then we show that the only resulting theory which implements a deformation of the original gauge symmetry happens to have essentially the structure of unimodular gravity. This makes plausible the possibility of a natural solution to the first cosmological constant problem in theories of emergent gravity. Later on, we change for the sake of completeness the starting free-field theory to Fierz-Pauli theory, an equivalent theory but with a larger gauge symmetry. We indicate how to carry out the infinite summation procedure in a similar way. Overall, we conclude that as long as one requires the (deformed) preservation of internal gauge invariance, one naturally recovers the structure of unimodular gravity or general relativity but in a version that explicitly shows the underlying Minkowski spacetime, in the spirit of Rosen’s flat-background bimetric theory.
PB American Physical Society
SN 1550-7998
YR 2014
FD 2014-06-16
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/33992
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/33992
LA eng
NO © 2014 American Physical Society. Financial support was provided by the Spanish MICINN through Projects No. FIS2011-30145-C03-01 and No. FIS2011-30145-C03-02 (with FEDER contribution), and by the Junta de Andalucía through Project No. FQM219. R. C-R. acknowledges support from CSIC through the JAE-predoc program, cofunded by FSE.
NO Spanish MICINN
NO Junta de Andalucía
NO CSIC
NO FSE
DS Docta Complutense
RD 6 abr 2025