Gauged galileons

Abstract

We discuss the gauging of non-linearly realized symmetries as a method to systematically construct spontaneously broken gauge theories. We focus in particular on galileon fields and, using a coset construction, we show how to recover massive gravity by gauging the galileon symmetry. We then extend our procedure to the special galileon, and obtain a theory that couples a massive spin-2 field with a traceless symmetric field, and is free of pathologies at quadratic order around flat space.