Vacua and instantons of ghost-free massive gravity

Abstract

Recently discovered models of ghost-free massive gravity and bigravity are characterized by a non-trivial potential that gives rise to a rich vacuum structure. We review maximally symmetric vacua of the de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) massive gravity and of the Hassan-Rosen (HR) bigravity, and discuss their perturbative stability. In particular, we discuss perturbations about self-accelerating vacua in HR bigravity, and argue that, analogously to what was found in the case of dRGT gravity, some of them contain strongly coupled modes. We then show that it is impossible to construct regular instantons connecting different classically stable vacua of dRGT gravity without violating energy conservation or the null energy condition.