Published August 15, 2002 | Version v1
Journal article

Photons and gravitons as Goldstone bosons and the cosmological constant

  • 1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095-1547 (United States)

Description

We reexamine a scenario in which photons and gravitons arise as Goldstone bosons associated with the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance. We study the emergence of Lorentz invariant low energy physics in an effective field theory framework, with non-Lorentz invariant effects arising from radiative corrections and higher order interactions. Spontaneous breaking of the Lorentz group also leads to additional exotic but weakly coupled Goldstone bosons, whose dispersion relations we compute. The usual cosmological constant problem is absent in this context: being a Goldstone boson, the graviton can never develop a potential, and the existence of a flat spacetime solution to the field equations is guaranteed

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
Journal Volume
66
Journal Issue
4
Journal Page Range
p. 045015-045015.10
ISSN
0556-2821
CODEN
PRVDAQ

Optional Information

Notes
(c) 2002 The American Physical Society