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arxiv 2309.06903 v2 pith:X2A74IOI submitted 2023-09-13 gr-qc hep-th

Nonexistence of a parent theory for general relativity and unimodular gravity

classification gr-qc hep-th
keywords constantcosmologicaltheorygaugeparentdiffeomorphismsgravitysymmetries
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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General Relativity (GR) and Unimodular Gravity (UG) provide two equivalent descriptions of gravity that differ in the nature of the cosmological constant. While GR is based on the group of diffeomorphisms that permits the cosmological constant in the action, UG is based on the subgroup of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms together with Weyl transformations which forbid the presence of the cosmological constant. However, the cosmological constant reappears in UG as an integration constant so it arises as a global degree of freedom. Since gauge symmetries are simply redundancies in our description of physical systems, a natural question is whether there exists a "parent theory" with the full diffeomorphisms and Weyl transformations as gauge symmetries so that it reduces to GR and UG respectively by performing suitable (partial) gauge fixings. We will explore this question by introducing Stueckelberg fields both in GR and UG to complete the gauge symmetries in each theory to that of the would-be parent theory. Despite the dynamical equivalence of the two theories, we find that precisely the additional global degree of freedom provided by the cosmological constant in UG obstructs the construction of the parent theory.

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