dRGT theory of massive gravity from spontaneous symmetry breaking

In this note we propose a topological action for a Poincare times diffeomorphism invariant gauge theory. We show that there is Higgs phase where the gauge symmetry is spontaneous broken to a diagonal Lorentz subgroup and gives the Einstein-Hilbert action plus the dRGT potential terms. In this vacuum, there are five (three from Goldstone modes) propagating degrees of freedom which form polarizations of a massive spin 2 particle, an extra healthy heavy scalar (Higgs) mode and no Boulware-Deser ghost mode. We further show that the action can be derived in a limit from a topological de Sitter invariant gauge theory in 4 dimensions.Comment: 5 pages, references and comments are added, equations corrected, published versio

Confinement from Distance in Metric Space and its Relation to Cosmological Constant

We argue that, in a theory of quantum gravity, the gauge coupling and the confinement scale of a gauge theory are related to distance in the space of metric configurations, and in turn to the cosmological constant. To support the argument, we compute the gauge kinetic functions in variuos supersymmetric Heterotic and type II string compactifications and show that they depend on distance. According to the swampland program, the distance between two (anti) de Sitter vacua in the space of metric configurations is proportional to the logarithm of the ratio of cosmological constants and thus the confinement scale depends on the value of the cosmological constant. In this framework, for de Sitter space, we revisit the swampland Festina Lente bound and gauge theories in the dark dimension scenario. We show that if the Festina Lente bound is realized in a de Sitter vacuum and dependence on distance is strong enough, it will be realized in vacua with higher cosmological constants. In dark dimension scenario, as the value of cosmological constant is related to the decompactifying dimension, we find that the confinement scale is indeed related to radius of dark dimension. We show that in this scenario the Festina Lente bound holds for the standard model QCD, as well as all confining gauge groups with $N_c\lesssim 10^3$.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure

Matrix Theory for the DLCQ of Type IIB String Theory on the AdS/Plane-wave

We propose a recipe to construct the DLCQ Hamiltonian of type IIB string theory on the AdS (and/or plane-wave) background. We consider a system of J number of coincident unstable non-BPS D0-branes of IIB theory in the light-cone gauge and on the plane-wave background with a compact null direction, the dynamics of which is described by the world-line U(J) gauge theory. This configuration suffers from tachyonic instabilities. Having instabilities been cured through the process of open string tachyon condensation, by expanding the theory about true minima of the effective potential and furthermore taking low energy limit to decouple the heavy modes, we end up with a 0+1-dimensional supersymmetric U(J) gauge theory, a Matrix Theory. We conjecture that the Hamiltonian of this Matrix Theory is just the DLCQ Hamiltonian of type IIB string theory on the AdS or equivalently plane-wave background in a sector with J units of light-cone momentum. We present some pieces of evidence in support of the proposal.Comment: LaTeX, 35 pages, 2 eps figures; v2: minor changes, references added; v3: minor change