Consistent Bimetric Theory and its Application to Cosmology

Abstract

Recently, the construction of ghost-free nonlinear massive spin-2 interactions solved a long outstanding problem in classical field theory. The consistent formulation requires a second rank-two tensor (or metric) and therefore has the form of a bimetric theory. Besides providing the solution to an old problem in field theory, ghost-free bimetric theory also has an interesting phenomenology: Its homogeneous and isotropic background solutions can reproduce the expansion history of the universe without any input of vacuum energy.