Gravitational Effective Action at Second Order in Curvature and Gravitational Waves

Abstract

We consider the full effective theory for quantum gravity at second order in curvature including non-local terms. We show that the theory contains two new degrees of freedom beyond the massless graviton: namely a massive spin-2 ghost and a massive scalar field. Furthermore, we show that it is impossible to fine-tune the parameters of the effective action to eliminate completely the classical spin-2 ghost because of the non-local terms in the effective action. Being a classical field, it is not clear anyway that this ghost is problematic. It simply implies a repulsive contribution to Newton's potential. We then consider how to extract the parameters of the effective action and show that it is possible to measure, at least in principle, the parameters of the local terms independently of each other using a combination of observations of gravitational waves and measurements performed by pendulum type experiments searching for deviations of Newton's potential.

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• Einstein ring of dust shells with quantum hair
• Quantum geodesics reflecting the internal structure of stars composed of shells
• Quantum Geometrodynamics of Higher Derivative Theories with and without Conformal Symmetry
• Gravitational acceleration in a class of geometric sigma models