Theories of massive gravity inevitably include an auxiliary reference metric. Generically, they also contain an inconsistency known as the Boulware-Deser ghost. Recently, a family of non-linear massive gravity actions, formulated with a flat reference metric, were proposed and shown to be ghost free at the complete non-linear level. In this paper we consider these non-linear massive gravity actions but now formulated with a general reference metric. We extend the proof of the absence of the Boulware-Deser ghost to this case. The analysis is carried out in the ADM formalism at the complete non-linear level. We show that in these models there always exists a Hamiltonian constraint which, with an associated secondary constraint, eliminates the ghost. This result considerably extends the range of known consistent non-linear massive gravity theories. In addition, these theories can also be used to describe a massive spin-2 field in an arbitrary, fixed gravitational background. We also discuss the positivity of the Hamiltonian.

We obtain the general cosmological evolution equations for a classically consistent theory of bimetric gravity. Their analytic solutions are demonstrated to generically allow for a cosmic evolution starting out from a matter dominated FLRW universe and relaxing towards a de Sitter (anti-de Sitter) phase at late cosmic time. In particular, we examine a subclass of models which contain solutions that are able to reproduce the expansion history of the cosmic concordance model inspite of the nonlinear couplings of the two metrics. This is demonstrated explicitly by fitting these models to observational data from Type Ia supernovae, Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. In the appendix we comment on the relation to massive gravity.

This review is dedicated to recent progress in the field of classical, interacting, massive spin-2 theories, with a focus on ghost-free bimetric theory. We will outline its history and its development as a nontrivial extension and generalisation of nonlinear massive gravity. We present a detailed discussion of the consistency proofs of both theories, before we review Einstein solutions to the bimetric equations of motion in vacuum as well as the resulting mass spectrum. We introduce couplings to matter and then discuss the general relativity and massive gravity limits of bimetric theory, which correspond to decoupling the massive or the massless spin-2 field from the matter sector, respectively. More general classical solutions are reviewed and the present status of bimetric cosmology is summarised. An interesting corner in the bimetric parameter space which could potentially give rise to a nonlinear theory for partially massless spin-2 fields is also discussed. Relations to higher-curvature theories of gravity are explained and finally we give an overview of possible extensions of the theory and review its formulation in terms of vielbeins.

Bimetric theory describes gravitational interactions in the presence of an extra spin-2 field. Previous work has suggested that its cosmological solutions are generically plagued by instabilities. We show that by taking the Planck mass for the second metric, $M_f$, to be small, these instabilities can be pushed back to unobservably early times. In this limit, the theory approaches general relativity with an effective cosmological constant which is, remarkably, determined by the spin-2 interaction scale. This provides a late-time expansion history which is extremely close to $\Lambda$CDM, but with a technically-natural value for the cosmological constant. We find $M_f$ should be no larger than the electroweak scale in order for cosmological perturbations to be stable by big-bang nucleosynthesis. We further show that in this limit the helicity-0 mode is no longer strongly-coupled at low energy scales.Comment: 8+2 pages, 2 tables. Version published in PLB. Minor typo corrections from v

We address some recent concerns about the absence of the Boulware-Deser ghost in the Stückelberg formulation of nonlinear massive gravity. First we provide general arguments for why any ghost analysis in the Stückelberg formulation has to agree with existing consistency proofs that have been carried out without using Stückelberg fields. We then demonstrate the absence of the ghost at the completely nonlinear level in the Stückelberg formulation of the minimal massive gravity action. The constraint that removes the ghost field and the associated secondary constraint that eliminates its conjugate momentum are computed explicitly, confirming the consistency of the theory in the Stückelberg formulation.

We provide further details on a recent proposal addressing the nature of the dark sectors in cosmology and demonstrate that all current observations related to Dark Matter can be explained by the presence of a heavy spin-2 particle. Massive spin-2 fields and their gravitational interactions are uniquely described by ghost-free bimetric theory, which is a minimal and natural extension of General Relativity. In this setup, the largeness of the physical Planck mass is naturally related to extremely weak couplings of the heavy spin-2 field to baryonic matter and therefore explains the absence of signals in experiments dedicated to Dark Matter searches. It also ensures the phenomenological viability of our model as we confirm by comparing it with cosmological and local tests of gravity. At the same time, the spin-2 field possesses standard gravitational interactions and it decays universally into all Standard Model fields but not into massless gravitons. Matching the measured DM abundance together with the requirement of stability constrains the spin-2 mass to be in the 1 to 100 TeV range.

We consider the issues that arise out of interpreting the ghost-free bimetric theory as a theory of a spin-2 field coupled to gravity. This requires identifying a gravitational metric and parameterizing deviations of the resulting theory from general relativity. To this end, we first consider the most general bimetric backgrounds for which a massless and a massive spin-2 fluctuation exist, and we compute the most general expression for the Fierz-Pauli mass. These backgrounds coincide with solutions in general relativity. Based on this, we obtain nonlinear extensions of the massive and massless spin-2 fields. The background value of the nonlinear massive field parameterizes generic deviations of the bimetric theory from GR. It is also shown that the most natural nonlinear massless field does not have standard ghost-free matter couplings, and hence cannot represent the gravitational metric. However, an appropriate gravitational metric can still be identified in the weak gravity limit. Hence in the presence of other neutral spin-2 fields, the weak gravity limit is crucial for compatibility with general relativity. We also write down the action in terms of the nonlinear massive spin-2 field and obtain its ghost-free couplings to matter. The discussion is then generalized to multimetric theories.

Abstract:We extend the notion of the Higuchi bound and partial masslessness to ghostfree nonlinear bimetric theories. This can be acheived in a simple way by first considering linear massive spin-2 perturbations around maximally symmetric background solutions, for which the linear gauge symmetry at the Higuchi bound is easily identified. Then, requiring consistency between an appropriate subset of these transformations and the dynamical nature of the backgrounds, fixes all but one parameter in the bimetric interaction potential. This specifies the theory upto the value of the Fierz-Pauli mass and leads to the unique candidate for nonlinear partially massless bimetric theory.