Constraints on a gravitational Higgs mechanisms

Abstract

We show that it is impossible to improve the high-energy behavior of the tree-level four-point amplitude of a massive spin-2 particle by including the exchange of any number of scalars and vectors in four spacetime dimensions. This constrains possible weakly coupled ultraviolet extensions of massive gravity, ruling out gravitational analogues of the Higgs mechanism based on particles with spins less than two. Any tree-level ultraviolet extension that is Lorentz invariant and unitary must involve additional massive particles with spins greater than or equal to two, as in Kaluza-Klein theories and string theory.