Imperial College London
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Prof. Andrew J. Tolley

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Professor of Theoretical Physics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 1526a.tolley

 
 
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Location

 

607Huxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{de:2015:17/175008,
author = {de, Rham C and Matas, A and Ondo, NA and Tolley, AJ},
doi = {17/175008},
journal = {Classical and Quantum Gravity},
title = {Interactions of charged spin-2 fields},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0264-9381/32/17/175008},
volume = {32},
year = {2015}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - In light of recent progress in ghost-free theories of massive gravity and multi-gravity, we reconsider the problem of constructing a ghost-free theory of an interacting spin-2 field charged under a U(1) gauge symmetry. Our starting point is the theory originally proposed by Federbush, which is essentially Fierz–Pauli generalized to include a minimal coupling to a U(1) gauge field. We show the Federbush theory with a dynamical U(1) field is in fact ghost-free and can be treated as a healthy effective field theory to describe a massive charged spin-2 particle. It can even potentially have healthy dynamics above its strong-coupling scale. We then construct candidate gravitational extensions to the Federbush theory both by using dimensional deconstruction, and by constructing a general nonlinear completion. However, we find that the U(1) symmetry forces us to modify the form of the Einstein–Hilbert kinetic term. By performing a constraint analysis directly in the first-order form, we show that these modified kinetic terms inevitably reintroduce the Boulware–Deser ghost. As a by-product of our analysis, we present a new proof for ghost-freedom of bi-gravity in 2+1 dimensions (also known as Zwei-Dreibein gravity). We also give a complementary algebraic argument that the Einstein–Hilbert kinetic term is incompatible with a U(1) symmetry, for a finite number of gravitons.
AU  - de,Rham C
AU  - Matas,A
AU  - Ondo,NA
AU  - Tolley,AJ
DO  - 17/175008
PY  - 2015///
SN  - 0264-9381
TI  - Interactions of charged spin-2 fields
T2  - Classical and Quantum Gravity
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0264-9381/32/17/175008
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/51749
VL  - 32
ER  -
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