Massive spin-2 theories and their application to the dark matter problem

by Angnis Schmidt-May (LMU)

Thursday 16 Nov 2017, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

HS3 (Physikdepartment)

The Standard Model of Particle Physics contains particles of spin 0, 1/2 and 1, which generally appear as both massless and massive. General Relativity (GR), our standard theory for gravity, describes a massless spin-2 field. In regard of completeness, a massive spin-2 field would therefore be a natural addition to these models. For a long time it was believed that consistent theories for massive spin-2 fields do not exist, but recently this problem was overcome. The consistent theory for interacting massless and massive spin-2 fields is a bimetric theory for gravity, i.e. it contains two tensor fields. One of these tensors is the physical metric giving rise to gravitational interactions, very much like in GR. The other field contains the massive spin-2 degrees of freedom whose presence could have interesting implications for cosmology. In this talk I will review bimetric theory and argue that the massive spin-2 particle could be a candidate for dark matter whose interactions with ordinary matter are automatically suppressed by the Planck scale.