Published May 31, 2013 | Version Submitted
Journal Article Open

Partial masslessness and conformal gravity

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Brandeis University
  • 3. ROR icon Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
  • 4. ROR icon University of California, Davis

Abstract

We use conformal, but ghostful, Weyl gravity to study its ghost-free, second derivative, partially massless (PM) spin-2 component in the presence of Einstein gravity with positive cosmological constant. Specifically, we consider both gravitational- and self-interactions of PM via the fully nonlinear factorization of conformal gravity's Bach tensor into Einstein times Schouten operators. We find that extending PM beyond linear order suffers from familiar higher spin consistency obstructions: it propagates only in Einstein backgrounds, and the conformal gravity route generates only the usual safe, Noether, cubic order vertices.

Additional Information

© 2013 Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd. Received 15 October 2012. Published 14 May 2013. This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to 'Higher spin theories and holography'. We thank Hamid Afshar, Rod Gover, Daniel Grumiller and Karapet Mkrtchyan for fruitful discussions. EJ and AW acknowledge the ESI Vienna Workshop on Higher Spin Gravity. SD was supported in part by NSF PHY-1064302 and DOE DE-FG02-164 92ER40701 grants. The work of EJ was supported in part by Scuola Normale Superiore, by INFN (I.S. TV12) and by the MIUR-PRIN contract 2009-KHZKRX.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
39024
DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/46/21/214019
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20130621-105437857

Related works

Funding

NSF
PHY-1064302
Department of Energy (DOE)
DE-FG02-16492ER40701
Scuola Normale Superiore
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)
I.S. TV12
Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR)
2009-KHZKRX

Dates

Created
2013-06-21
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2022-07-12
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Caltech Theory
Other Numbering System Name
BRX
Other Numbering System Identifier
TH-658