HIGGS MECHANISM FOR GRAVITONS

Abstract

Just like the vector gauge bosons in the gauge theories, it is now known that gravitons acquire mass in the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking of diffeomorphisms through the condensation of scalar fields. The point is that we should find the gravitational Higgs mechanism such that it results in massive gravity in a flat Minkowski spacetime without non-unitary propagating modes. This is usually achieved by including higher-derivative terms in scalars and tuning the cosmological constant to be a negative value in a proper way. Recently, a similar but different gravitational Higgs mechanism has been advocated by Chamseddine and Mukhanov where one can relax the negative cosmological constant to zero or positive one. In this work, we investigate why the non-unitary ghost mode decouples from physical Hilbert space in a general spacetime dimension. Moreover, we generalize the model to possess an arbitrary potential and clarify under what conditions the general model exhibits the gravitational Higgs mechanism. By searching for solutions to the conditions, we arrive at two classes of potentials exhibiting gravitational Higgs mechanism. One class includes the model by Chamseddine and Mukhanov in a specific case while the other is a completely new model.