We consider the so-called "healthy" extension of Hořava gravity in the limit where the Stuckelberg field decouples from the graviton. We verify the alleged strong coupling problem in this limit, under the assumption that no large dimensionless parameters are put in by hand. This follows from the fact that the dispersion relation for the Stuckelberg field does not have the desired z = 3 anisotropic scaling in the UV. To get the desired scaling and avoid strong coupling one has to introduce a low scale of Lorentz violation and retain some coupling between the graviton and the Stuckelberg field. We also make use of the foliation preserving symmetry to show how the Stuckelberg field couples to some violation of energy conservation. We source the Stuckelberg field using a point particle with a slowly varying mass and show that two such particles feel a constant attractive force. In this particular example, we see no Vainshtein effect, and violations of the Equivalence Principle. The latter is probably generic to other types of source and could potentially be used to place lower bounds on the scale of Lorentz violation. * ppxik1@nottingham.ac.uk

We consider the role of matter in the non-projectable version of Hořava-Liftshitz gravity at both a classical and a quantum level. At the classical level, we construct general forms of matter Lagrangians consistent with the reduced symmetry group and demonstrate that they must be reduced to their relativistic form if they are to avoid sourcing the gravitational Stückelberg field. At the quantum level we consider one loop corrections to the propagator for a relativistic scalar minimally coupled to gravity at tree level. We find large corrections to the light cone at low energies arising from the strength of the coupling of the scalar graviton to matter. We also find evidence that higher order time derivatives may be generated, which is worrying if this is to be taken seriously as a UV complete theory. Contents

We present a novel idea for screening the vacuum energy contribution to the overall value of the cosmological constant, thereby enabling us to choose the bare value of the vacuum curvature empirically, without any need to worry about the zero-point energy contributions of each particle. The trick is to couple matter to a metric that is really a composite of other fields, with the property that the square-root of its determinant is the integrand of a topological invariant, and/or a total derivative. This ensures that the vacuum energy contribution to the Lagrangian is non-dynamical. We then give an explicit example of a theory with this property that is free from Ostrogradski ghosts, and is consistent with solar system physics and cosmological tests.