A new extension of Hořava-Lifshitz gravity and curing pathologies of the scalar graviton

Abstract

We consider an extension of the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity with extra conformal symmetry by introducing a scalar field with higher order curvature terms. Relaxing the exact local Weyl symmetry, we construct an action with three free parameters which breaks local anisotropic Weyl symmetry but still preserves residual global Weyl symmetry. At low energies, it reduces to a Lorentz-violating scalar-tensor gravity. With a constant scalar field background and particular choices of the parameters, it reduces to the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz (HL) gravity, but any perturbation from these particular configurations produces some non-trivial extensions of HL gravity. The perturbation analysis of the new extended HL gravity in the Minkowski background shows thatthe pathological behaviors of scalar graviton, i.e., ghost or instability problem, and strong coupling problem do not emerge up to cubic order as well as quadratic order.