The graviton Higgs mechanism

Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Tokyo University of Science - 1-3, Kagurazaka, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8601, Japan and State Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, PRC

Received: 25 August 2015
Accepted: 15 September 2015

Abstract

The Higgs mechanism at the graviton level formulated as a Vainshtein mechanism in time domains implies that the extra-degrees of freedom become relevant depending on the direction of time (frame of reference) with respect to the preferred time direction (preferred frame) defined by the Stückelberg function which contains the information of the extra-degrees of freedom of the theory. In this manuscript, I make the general definition of the Higgs mechanism by analyzing the gauge symmetries of the action and the general form of the vacuum solutions for the graviton field. In general, the symmetry generators depending explicitly on the Stückelberg fields are broken at the vacuum level. These broken generators, define the number of Nambu-Goldstone bosons which will be eating up by the dynamical metric in order to become massive.