Gravitons and gauge fields in 5d Chern-Simons supergravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates five-dimensional Chern-Simons supergravity, examining how small deformations of the theory can produce realistic graviton and gauge field behaviors similar to those in standard low-energy physics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that slight modifications to 5d CS supergravity can recover familiar graviton and gauge field dynamics, bridging the gap with real-world physics.

Findings

Deforming the CS action introduces non-trivial propagation around AdS.

Asymptotically Schwarzschild solutions emerge after deformation.

Gauge fields acquire standard quadratic propagators.

Abstract

Despite the nice geometrical properties of higher dimensional Chern-Simons (CS) supergravity theories these actions suffer from one major drawback, namely, their connection with the real world. After some quick remarks on three-dimensional gravity, we consider five-dimensional CS supergravity and study to what extend this theory reproduces the standard low energy description of gravitons and gauge fields. We point out that if one deforms the CS action by changing the value of the cosmological constant by a small amount (thus breaking the CS symmetry), propagation around AdS becomes non-trivial, asymptotically (AdS) Schwarzschild solutions exist, and the gauge field acquires its standard quadratic propagator.