Massive to gauge field reduction and gravitational wave zone information

Abstract

We show explicitly that massive, Abelian, vector, just like (properly defined) massive tensor, fields limit smoothly to their massless, gauge, versions: they emit only maximal helicity radiation and mediate Coulomb and (special relativistic) Newtonian, forces between their (conserved) sources. Our main motivation, though, is to show that the recent gravitational wave detection probably cannot directly rule out very long-range gravity: Even though the waves were emitted in a strong field regime, their being detected in the weak field wave zone means the above equivalences apply. There remains the, not unlikely, possibility that no strong field generation of radiation in massive models can reproduce the observed ring-down patterns. Separately, the smooth linear limiting behaviors show that the discontinuity lies not in the mass alone, but rather in Abelian versus non-Abelian, Yang-Mills and General Relativity, regimes, whose respective massive versions are known to be non-physical.