Photons and Gravitons as Goldstone Bosons, and the Cosmological Constant

Abstract

We reexamine a scenario in which photons and gravitons arise as Goldstone bosons associated with the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance. We study the emergence of Lorentz invariant low energy physics in an effective field theory framework, with non-Lorentz invariant effects arising from radiative corrections and higher order interactions. Spontaneous breaking of the Lorentz group also leads to additional exotic but weakly coupled Goldstone bosons, whose dispersion relations we compute. The usual cosmological constant problem is absent in this context: being a Goldstone boson, the graviton can never develop a potential, and the existence of a flat spacetime solution to the field equations is guaranteed.