Restricted Galileons

TL;DR

This paper investigates a special class of Galileon theories from ghost-free massive gravity, revealing their unique coupling properties, stability conditions, and cosmological solutions, with implications for observational constraints and the graviton mass.

Contribution

It introduces a subclass of Galileon theories with specific coefficient relations and coupling to stress-tensors, analyzing their stability, solutions, and observational viability.

Findings

No static stable spherically symmetric solutions connecting Vainshtein and flat space.

Vainshtein solutions can be matched to cosmological backgrounds.

A graviton mass comparable to the Hubble parameter is consistent with data.

Abstract

We study Galileon theories that emerge in ghost-free massive gravity. In particular, we focus on a sub-class of these theories where the Galileons can be completely decoupled from the tensor Lagrangian. These Galileons differ from generic ones -- they have interrelated coefficients of the cubic and quartic terms, and most importantly, a non-standard coupling to external stress-tensors, governed by the same coefficient. We show that this theory has no static stable spherically symmetric solutions that would interpolate from the Vainshtein region to flat space; these two regions cannot be smoothly matched for the sign of the coefficient for which fluctuations are stable. Instead, for this sign choice, a solution in the Vainshtein domain is matched onto a cosmological background. Small fluctuations above this solution are stable, and sub-luminal. We discuss observational constraints on this theory, within the quantum effective Lagrangian approach, and argue that having a graviton mass of the order of the present-day Hubble parameter, is consistent with the data. Last but not least, we also present a general class of cosmological solutions in this theory, some of which exhibit the de-mixing phenomenon, previously found for the self-accelerated solution.