Higher derivative scalar-tensor theory from the spatially covariant gravity: a linear algebraic analysis

TL;DR

This paper develops a linear algebraic framework to analyze ghost-free higher derivative scalar-tensor theories, establishing isomorphisms between covariant and spatially covariant formulations to identify ghost-free subspaces.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism using linear spaces and projection matrices to systematically construct ghost-free higher derivative scalar-tensor theories from spatially covariant gravity.

Findings

Identified subspaces with at most three propagating degrees of freedom.

Established isomorphism between covariant and spatially covariant scalar-tensor monomials.

Derived explicit expressions for the projection matrices.

Abstract

We investigate the ghostfree scalar-tensor theory with a timelike scalar field, with derivatives of the scalar field up to the third order and with the Riemann tensor up to the quadratic order. We build two types of linear spaces. One is the set of linearly independent generally covariant scalar-tensor monomials, the other is the set of linearly independent spatially covariant gravity monomials. We argue that these two types of linear space are isomorphic to each other in the sense of gauge fixing/recovering procedures. We then identify the subspaces in the spatially covariant gravity, which are spanned by linearly independent monomials built of the extrinsic and intrinsic curvature, the lapse function as well as their spatial derivatives, up to the fourth order in the total number of derivatives. The vectors in these subspaces, i.e., spatially covariant polynomials, automatically propagate at most three degrees of freedom. As a result, their images under the gauge recovering mappings are automatically the subspaces of scalar-tensor theory that propagate up to three degrees of freedom as long as the scalar field is timelike. The mappings from the spaces of spatially covariant gravity to the spaces of scalar-tensor theory are encoded in the projection matrices, of which we also derived the expressions explicitly. Our formalism and results can be useful in deriving the generally covariant higher derivative scalar-tensor theory without ghost(s).