Hamiltonian formulation of gravity as a spontaneously-broken gauge theory of the Lorentz group

Abstract

A number of approaches to gravitation have much in common with the gauge theories of the standard model of particle physics. In this paper, we develop the Hamiltonian formulation of a class of gravitational theories that may be regarded as spontaneously-broken gauge theories of the complexified Lorentz group SO(1,3)C with the gravitational field described entirely by a gauge field valued in the Lie algebra of SO(1,3)C and a ‘Higgs field’ valued in the group’s fundamental representation. The theories have one free parameter β which appears in a similar role to the inverse of the Barbero–Immirzi parameter of Einstein–Cartan theory. However, contrary to that parameter, it is shown that the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) crucially depends on the value of β. For non-zero values of β, it is shown the theories possesses three complex DOFs, and for the specific values β=±i an extension to general relativity is recovered in a symmetry-broken regime. For the value β = 0, the theory possesses no local DOFs. A non-zero value of β corresponds to the self-dual and anti-self-dual gauge fields appearing asymmetrically in the action, therefore in these models, the existence of gravitational DOFs is tied to chiral asymmetry in the gravitational sector.