Massive Gravity on Curved Background

Abstract

We investigate generally covariant theories which admit a Fierz-Pauli mass term for metric perturbations around an arbitrary curved background. For this we restore the general covariance of the Fierz-Pauli mass term by introducing four scalar fields which preserve a certain internal symmetry in their configuration space. It is then apparent that for each given spacetime metric this construction corresponds to a completely different generally covariant massive gravity theory with different symmetries. The proposed approach is verified by explicit analysis of the physical degrees of freedom of massive graviton on de Sitter space.