Superluminality in the Fierz–Pauli massive gravity

Abstract

We study the propagation of helicity-1 gravitons in the Fierz–Pauli massive gravity in nearly Minkowski backgrounds. We show that, generically, there exist backgrounds consistent with field equations, in which the propagation is superluminal. The relevant distances are much longer than the ultraviolet cutoff length inherent in the Fierz–Pauli gravity, so superluminality occurs within the domain of validity of the effective low-energy theory. There remains a possibility that one may get rid of this property by imposing fine tuning relations between the coefficients in the nonlinear generalization of the Fierz–Pauli mass term, order by order in nonlinearity; however, these relations are not protected by any obvious symmetry. Thus, among others, superluminality is a problematic property to worry about when attempting to construct infrared modifications of general relativity.