Spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance, solitons and gravitational waves in theories of conformally invariant gravitation

TL;DR

This paper explores how conformal invariance can be spontaneously broken in conformal gravity, leading to stable solutions like solitons and gravitational waves, with implications for the viability of such theories.

Contribution

It demonstrates the spontaneous breaking of conformal symmetry via matter interactions, analyzes gravitational perturbations in anti-de Sitter space, and introduces domain wall solitons as ground states.

Findings

Gravitational fluctuations around AdS carry zero energy-momentum.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking solutions include de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces.

Domain wall solitons interpolate between broken symmetry ground states.

Abstract

We study conformal gravity as an alternative theory of gravitation. For conformal gravity to be phenomenologically viable requires that the conformal symmetry is not manifest at the energy scales of the other known physical forces. Hence we require a mechanism for the spontaneous breaking of conformal invariance. In this paper we study the possibility that conformal invariance is spontaneously broken due to interactions with conformally coupled matter fields. The vacuum of the theory admits conformally non-invariant solutions corresponding to maximally symmetric space-times and variants thereof. These are either de Sitter space-time or anti-de Sitter space-time in the full four space-time dimensions or in a lower dimensional sub-space. We consider in particular normalizable, linearized gravitational perturbations around the anti-de Sitter background. Exploiting the conformal flatness of this space-time, we show to second order, that these gravitational fluctuations, that are taken to be fourier decomposable, carry zero energy-momentum. This squares well with the theorem that asymptotically flat space-times conformal gravity contain zero energy and momentum \cite{bhs}. We also show the possibility of domain wall solitons interpolating between the ground states of spontaneously broken conformal symmetry that we have found. These solitons necessarily require the vanishing of the scalar field, repudiating the recent suggestion \cite{f} that the conformal symmetry could be quarantined to a sterile sector of the theory by choosing an appropriate field redefinition.