Note on Covariant St\"uckelberg Formalism and Absence of Boulware-Deser Ghost in Bi-gravity

Abstract

The covariant St\"{u}ckelberg formalism is applied to bi-gravity in order to revisit the issue of absence of the Boulware-Deser (BD) ghost. We first confirm that the leading order action in the decoupling limit for helicity-2 modes of metrics and helicity-0 mode of St\"{u}ckelberg perturbations does not lead to higher time derivative in equations of motion, which suggests the absence of the BD ghost. By extending this method, we reconfirm that the BD ghost does not appear for arbitrary order of the perturbations at the decoupling limit in bi-gravity.