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arXiv · 2406.19268

On the stability of fracton gravity

Evangelos Afxonidis·Alessio Caddeo·Carlos Hoyos·Daniele Musso
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Abstract

We study the stability of fracton gravity, a variant of linearized gravity where the gauge symmetry is restricted to longitudinal diffeomorphisms. These transformations can be connected to a spacetime generalization of dipole symmetry, hence the tag fracton. We find that fracton gravity features an instability in the spin-1 sector corresponding to solutions with growing amplitude. This dynamical instability can be removed by tuning the couplings of the theory. Nonetheless, the Hamiltonian for the spin-1 modes remains always unbounded from below when evaluated on the classical solutions. We find no other sources of instability in the spin-2 or spin-0 sectors. We analyze in detail the canonical formulation and the constraints arguing that neither auxiliary fields nor gauge-fixing conditions can be employed to remove the problematic vector modes or stabilize them.

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Evangelos Afxonidis, Alessio Caddeo, Carlos Hoyos, Daniele Musso. 2024-06-27. On the stability of fracton gravity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19268

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