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arXiv · 1806.10607

A Universal Bound on the Strong Coupling Scale of a Gravitationally Coupled Massive Spin-2 Particle

James Bonifacio·Kurt Hinterbichler
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Abstract

We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them to find the maximum scale of perturbative unitarity violation. The highest scale is $Λ_3=\left(m^2M_P\right)^{1/3}$, which is saturated by ghost-free bigravity. The strong coupling scale can be further raised to $M_P$ if the kinetic term for one particle has the wrong sign, which uniquely gives the amplitudes of quadratic curvature gravity. We also discuss the generalization to massive higher-spin particles coupled to gravity.

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James Bonifacio, Kurt Hinterbichler. 2018-08-08. A Universal Bound on the Strong Coupling Scale of a Gravitationally Coupled Massive Spin-2 Particle. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.98.085006

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