Covariant BRST quantization of unimodular gravity. II. Formulation with a vector antighost

Abstract

In our previous paper, we have presented a covariant BRST quantization of unimodular gravity which may account for the smallness of the cosmological constant, and have shown that the physical degrees of freedom in the theory are the same as general relativity. The formulation has been given by using rank-2 antisymmetric tensor fields for both ghosts and antighosts. Here we give an alternative formulation using a vector field for the antighost but keeping the same structure for the ghosts. This gives a significantly simpler covariant quantization with less ghosts and no tripole modes in the ghost sector. We show that this also gives only two physical transverse modes as in general relativity.