Dual actions for massless, partially-massless and massive gravitons in (A)dS

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified, Lorentz-invariant framework for electric-magnetic duality of gravitons—massless, partially-massless, and massive—in maximally symmetric spacetimes of any dimension greater than three, clarifying the dual graviton's nature.

Contribution

It extends duality analysis to all graviton types in (A)dS spaces at the action level with manifest Lorentz invariance, including the partially-massless case, and clarifies the dual graviton's properties.

Findings

Unified duality description for all graviton types.

Explicit counting of physical degrees of freedom.

Clarification of the dual graviton's nature across parameter space.

Abstract

We provide a unified treatment of electric-magnetic duality, at the action level and with manifest Lorentz invariance, for massive, massless as well as partially-massless gravitons propagating in maximally symmetric spacetimes of any dimension n>3. For massive and massless fields, we complete previous analyses that use parent-action techniques by giving dual descriptions that enable direct counting of physical degrees of freedom in the flat and massless limit. The same treatment is extended to the partially-massless case, where the duality has been previously discussed in covariant form only at the level of the equations of motion. The nature of the dual graviton is therefore clarified for all values of the mass and of the cosmological constant.