Classical Kerr-Schild double copy in bigravity for maximally symmetric spacetimes

Abstract

Abstract A generalized Kerr-Schild ansatz for bigravity, already considered in the literature, which leads to linear interactions between the metrics is used to study the bigravity equations in the context of the double copy. By contracting the resulting spin-2 field bigravity equations of motion using Killing vector fields, as is usually carried out in general relativity, we arrive to the single and zeroth copy equations for the mentioned ansatz. For the case of stationary solutions, we obtain two Maxwell and two conformally coupled scalar field equations for the single and zeroth copies respectively, and the linear interactions are absent. In the time-dependent case we obtain equations for the fields which are coupled. By decoupling these equations and at the zeroth copy level, we recover a massless and a massive field whose mass is proportional to the Fierz-Pauli mass and depends on the coefficients of the interaction potential between the metrics. This has been also previously documented in the literature and is now reinterpreted within the context of the double copy proposal.