New formalism for perturbations of massive gravity theories around arbitrary background spacetimes

Abstract

We develop a new technique for studying the perturbations of dRGT-type massive gravity theories around arbitrary background spacetimes. Built initially from the vielbein formulation of the theory, but switching back to the metric formulation afterwards, our approach bypasses many of the complications that arise in previous metric formulation approaches to linearising massive gravity around generic backgrounds, naturally elucidates the ghost-free structure of the interactions, and readily generalises to higher orders in perturbation theory, as well as to multiple interacting metric tensor fields. To demonstrate the power of our technique, we apply our formalism to a number of commonly occurring example backgrounds - proportional, cosmological, and black hole - recovering and extending many known results from the literature at linear order. Lastly, we provide, for the first time, the cubic order multi-gravity potential around a generic background spacetime.