Modified Gravity via Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

B. M. Gripaios (Oxford)

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Modified Gravity via Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

B. M. Gripaios (Oxford)

High Energy Physics - Theory · Submitted 17 Aug 2004

abstract compiled · 2026-09-23 · no language-model review

The authors' main claim They are manifestly well-behaved in the UV and free of discontinuities of the van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov type, ensuring compatibility with standard tests of gravity.

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The paper's own sentences, arranged. Each label is drawn from a closed vocabulary; the number beside it is the probability the classifier gave that label. Numbers in the tables are the authors', checked by code. No sentence in this record was written by a model.

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Compiled by classifier-1.13-20260917 via OpenRouter, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-09-23: 1 request, 4,850 input tokens, $0.0002 reported.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.04 · states limitation 0.20 · human participants 0.01 · controlled comparison 0.03 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.90 · compares with prior results 0.42 · mentions code or data availability 0.01.

The abstract, sentence by sentence

arXiv listing abstract v3. Results and the main claim are underlined; show every role.

We construct effective field theories in which gravity is modified via spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. This is a gravitational analogue of the Higgs mechanism. These theories possess additional graviton modes and modified dispersion relations. They are manifestly well-behaved in the UV and free of discontinuities of the van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov type, ensuring compatibility with standard tests of gravity. They may have important phenomenological effects on large distance scales, offering an alternative to dark energy. For the case in which the symmetry is broken by a vector field with the wrong sign mass term, we identify four massless graviton modes (all with positive-definite norm for a suitable choice of a parameter) and show the absence of the discontinuity.

background contribution method result interpretation main claim

What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#	sentence	role	the authors' own work	states the main conclusion	strength
s0	We construct effective field theories in which gravity is modified via spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance.	contribution 0.99	0.95	0.19	asserted 1.00
s1	This is a gravitational analogue of the Higgs mechanism.	interpretation 0.93	0.29	0.08	asserted 1.00
s2	These theories possess additional graviton modes and modified dispersion relations.	result 0.91	0.74	0.12	asserted 1.00
s3	They are manifestly well-behaved in the UV and free of discontinuities of the van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov type, ensuring compatibility with standard tests of gravity.	result 0.87	0.75	0.26	asserted 1.00
s4	They may have important phenomenological effects on large distance scales, offering an alternative to dark energy.	interpretation 0.99	0.34	0.17	hedged possibility 1.00
s5	For the case in which the symmetry is broken by a vector field with the wrong sign mass term, we identify four massless graviton modes (all with positive-definite norm for a suitable choice of a parameter) and show the absence of the discontinuity.	result 0.89	0.95	0.24	asserted 1.00

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: theoretical result 1.00 · evidence from proof or derivation 0.99.

What was examined, and what was not

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arXiv listing abstract v3

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full text
figures and tables
references and citing sentences
relations to other papers

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P abstract

not run

S sections
T body sentences
C citations
R cross-paper relations

Every quoted sentence on this record is the authors'. Every label is from Pith's closed vocabulary, with the probability shown beside it. Every number in the measurements table is the authors', checked by code. Record as JSON

The paper

Original abstract

We construct effective field theories in which gravity is modified via spontaneous breaking of local Lorentz invariance. This is a gravitational analogue of the Higgs mechanism. These theories possess additional graviton modes and modified dispersion relations. They are manifestly well-behaved in the UV and free of discontinuities of the van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov type, ensuring compatibility with standard tests of gravity. They may have important phenomenological effects on large distance scales, offering an alternative to dark energy. For the case in which the symmetry is broken by a vector field with the wrong sign mass term, we identify four massless graviton modes (all with positive-definite norm for a suitable choice of a parameter) and show the absence of the discontinuity.

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References

Forward citations

Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

A Material Frame: Hard Recoils from Slow Force Carriers
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Making the photon's longitudinal mode a physical, ultra-slow particle turns gauge invariance into a smooth limit and predicts rare, hard recoils of charges against a preferred frame, bounded to c_L ≲ 10^-60 by xenon d...
Positivity Bounds for Massive Spin-1 and Spin-2 Fields
hep-th 2018-04 accept novelty 7.0 of 10

Positivity bounds applied to massive gravity at 2-2 scattering force the ghost-free Lambda-3 tuning, and the Lambda-3 positivity island survives first-derivative bounds.
Phantom without UV pathology
hep-th 2006-04 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

A 4D effective field theory model achieves phantom-like equation of state with no UV ghosts, tachyons or superluminal modes, at the price of IR instabilities below a low scale and fine-tuning.
Spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance, black holes and perpetuum mobile of the 2nd kind
hep-th 2006-03 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

In a Lorentz-violating theory with species-dependent particle speeds, black holes emit thermal radiation at a species-dependent temperature, which implies a possible violation of the second law.
Spherical Solutions in Einstein-Aether Theory: Static Aether and Stars
gr-qc 2006-03 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

The static aether vacuum solution of Einstein-Aether theory is found in closed form and features a throat and an extremal singular horizon, with constant-density star solutions exhibiting mass extrema and associated i...

Show 8 more citing papers

Spontaneous Lorentz Breaking at High Energies
hep-th 2006-03 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

Gauging the ghost condensate yields a vector-field theory of spontaneous Lorentz violation that evades the 100 GeV bound and allows a breaking scale up to about 10^12 GeV, with distinctive spin-dependent forces.
Phases of massive gravity
hep-th 2004-09 accept novelty 7.0 of 10

A systematic classification of Lorentz-violating graviton masses identifies the phases that avoid ghosts and rapid instabilities, including two new symmetry-protected theories that remain well behaved under arbitrary ...
Ground State Wave Function Overlap in Superconductors and Superfluids
cond-mat.supr-con 2019-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

Ground state wavefunction overlap vanishes for generic phase rotations in bosonic condensates and equals one only for the electromagnetic rotation in superconductors, mapping directly to the Goldstone spectrum.
A general theory of linear cosmological perturbations: scalar-tensor and vector-tensor theories
gr-qc 2016-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

A Noether-identity-based recipe generates the most general linearly diffeomorphism-invariant quadratic action for cosmological perturbations, yielding complete parameter counts for scalar-tensor, vector-tensor and Ein...
Black Holes and Abelian Symmetry Breaking
hep-th 2016-02 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

Exact static, spherically symmetric black hole solutions exist in a vector-tensor theory with a non-minimal vector-gravity coupling, with Schwarzschild geometry and a nontrivial longitudinal vector profile carrying a ...
Einstein-aether gravity: a status report
gr-qc 2008-01 accept novelty 3.0 of 10

A review of Einstein-aether gravity concluding that the theory matches all current weak-field, cosmological, and stability constraints within a finite region of its four coupling parameters.
Einstein-Aether Theory
gr-qc 2004-09 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

A status report on Einstein-Aether theory: a generally covariant gravity theory with a dynamical preferred frame, covering its wave spectrum, post-Newtonian behavior, energy conditions, and cosmological consequences.
Infrared-modified gravities and massive gravitons
hep-th 2008-02 accept novelty 2.0 of 10

Lorentz-violating massive gravity can avoid the ghost and strong-coupling problems of the Fierz-Pauli theory, at the price of giving up Lorentz invariance and relying on residual gauge symmetries.

How the literature uses it

21 arXiv papers cite this in 27 sentences

Each citing sentence is taken from the citing paper's LaTeX source and typed by Pith's classifier. A label appears at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), a contest at 0.7 or more; the quoted words are the citing authors'. How each label was checked · JSON

Papers citing it · 9 sentences without a confident label

Compares with it 1 paper

Notice that this result does not agree with [ref] , though it does agree with the result found in aether theories [ref] , upon the identification in equations ([ref]).

Effective Theory Approach to the Spontaneous Breakdown of Lorentz Invariance · Vector Sector · 0.82

Cites it as background 14 papers

Stealth black hole solutions have also been obtained in the class of theories denoted as vector-tensor theories [ref] , that were proposed to explain dark energy by breaking the Abelian symmetry, by coupling vector fields to gravity non-minimally [ref] .

To stealth or not to stealth: Thermodynamics of stealth black holes · Introduction · 0.90
The first one is the so-called “spontaneously Lorentz symmetry breaking" massive vector field theory (coupled with the gravity: see e.g. [ref] ).

Forbidden Landscape from Holography · Introduction · 0.95
Such models have been of vast interest both in a nongravitational context [ref] and in the presence of gravity [ref] .

Hamiltonian formulation for scalar model of spontaneous spacetime symmetry violation in gravity · Introduction · 0.93

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