Non-local massive gravity

We present a general covariant action for massive gravity merging together a class of "non-polynomial" and super-renormalizable or finite theories of gravity with the non-local theory of gravity recently proposed by Jaccard, Maggiore and Mitsou (Phys. Rev. D 88 (2013) 044033). Our diffeomorphism invariant action gives rise to the equations of motion appearing in non-local massive massive gravity plus quadratic curvature terms. Not only the massive graviton propagator reduces smoothly to the massless one without a vDVZ discontinuity, but also our finite theory of gravity is unitary at tree level around the Minkowski background. We also show that, as long as the graviton mass $m$ is much smaller the today's Hubble parameter $H_0$, a late-time cosmic acceleration can be realized without a dark energy component due to the growth of a scalar degree of freedom. In the presence of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$, the dominance of the non-local mass term leads to a kind of "degravitation" for $\Lambda$ at the late cosmological epoch.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Revisiting chameleon gravity - thin-shells and no-shells with appropriate boundary conditions

We derive analytic solutions of a chameleon scalar field $\phi$ that couples to a non-relativistic matter in the weak gravitational background of a spherically symmetric body, paying particular attention to a field mass $m_A$ inside of the body. The standard thin-shell field profile is recovered by taking the limit $m_A*r_c \to \infty$, where $r_c$ is a radius of the body. We show the existence of "no-shell" solutions where the field is nearly frozen in the whole interior of the body, which does not necessarily correspond to the "zero-shell" limit of thin-shell solutions. In the no-shell case, under the condition $m_A*r_c \gg 1$, the effective coupling of $\phi$ with matter takes the same asymptotic form as that in the thin-shell case. We study experimental bounds coming from the violation of equivalence principle as well as solar-system tests for a number of models including $f(R)$ gravity and find that the field is in either the thin-shell or the no-shell regime under such constraints, depending on the shape of scalar-field potentials. We also show that, for the consistency with local gravity constraints, the field at the center of the body needs to be extremely close to the value $\phi_A$ at the extremum of an effective potential induced by the matter coupling.Comment: 14 pages, no figure