Unitarity analysis of general Born-Infeld gravity theories

We develop techniques of analyzing the unitarity of general Born-Infeld (BI) gravity actions in D-dimensional spacetimes. Determinantal form of the action allows us to find a compact expression quadratic in the metric fluctuations around constant curvature backgrounds. This is highly nontrivial since for the BI actions, in principle, infinitely many terms in the curvature expansion should contribute to the quadratic action in the metric fluctuations around constant curvature backgrounds, which would render the unitarity analysis intractable. Moreover in even dimensions, unitarity of the theory depends only on finite number of terms built from the powers of the curvature tensor. We apply our techniques to some four-dimensional examples.Comment: 26 pages, typos corrected, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Critical Points of D-Dimensional Extended Gravities

We study the parameter space of D-dimensional cosmological Einstein gravity together with quadratic curvature terms. In D>4 there are in general two distinct (anti)-de Sitter vacua. We show that for appropriate choice of the parameters there exists a critical point for one of the vacua, for which there are only massless tensor, but neither massive tensor nor scalar, gravitons. At criticality, the linearized excitations have vanishing energy (as do black hole solutions). A further restriction of the parameters gives a one-parameter cosmological Einstein plus Weyl^2 model with a unique vacuum, whose \Lambda is determined.Comment: 6 pages, typos correcte

All unitary cubic curvature gravities in D dimensions

We construct all the unitary cubic curvature gravity theories built on the contractions of the Riemann tensor in D -dimensional (anti)-de Sitter spacetimes. Our construction is based on finding the equivalent quadratic action for the general cubic curvature theory and imposing ghost and tachyon freedom, which greatly simplifies the highly complicated problem of finding the propagator of cubic curvature theories in constant curvature backgrounds. To carry out the procedure we have also classified all the unitary quadratic models. We use our general results to study the recently found cubic curvature theories using different techniques and the string generated cubic curvature gravity model. We also study the scattering in critical gravity and give its cubic curvature extensions.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure, v2: A subsection on cubic curvature extensions of critical gravity is added, v3: The part regarding critical gravity is revised. Version to appear in Class. Quant. Gra

İstanbul Karayları

Donated by Klaus Kreise