McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics
Informal Pizza Seminar

Mass(less)ness in (A)dS

Andrew Waldron

Brandeis

We show that massless and massive propagation is a degeneracy peculiar to Minkowski spacetime. Spin s fields in cosmological backgrounds can be massive (2s+1 DoF) or strictly massless (2 DoF) according to whether the theory is gauge invariant or not. However there are also intermediate theories (2s-1,2s-3,... DoF) thanks to new partial gauge invariances. We also analyze the stability and unitarity of these new models.

Tuesday, May 1st 2001, 13:15
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 326