Photons and Gravitons as Goldstone Bosons, and the Cosmological Constant

TL;DR

This paper explores a model where photons and gravitons are Goldstone bosons from spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking, leading to a natural resolution of the cosmological constant problem by preventing graviton potential development.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework where gauge bosons emerge as Goldstone bosons, ensuring a flat spacetime solution and addressing the cosmological constant issue.

Findings

Photons and gravitons can be realized as Goldstone bosons from Lorentz symmetry breaking.

The model predicts additional exotic Goldstone bosons with specific dispersion relations.

The cosmological constant problem is naturally resolved in this framework.

Abstract

We reexamine a scenario in which photons and gravitons arise as Goldstone bosons associated with the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance. We study the emergence of Lorentz invariant low energy physics in an effective field theory framework, with non-Lorentz invariant effects arising from radiative corrections and higher order interactions. Spontaneous breaking of the Lorentz group also leads to additional exotic but weakly coupled Goldstone bosons, whose dispersion relations we compute. The usual cosmological constant problem is absent in this context: being a Goldstone boson, the graviton can never develop a potential, and the existence of a flat spacetime solution to the field equations is guaranteed.