Joint cosmology seminar at Tufts:

Tuesday, April 18, 2017, 2:30 pm
574 Boston Ave, Room 310
Tufts University
Refreshments at 2:00 outside room 304

Special Relativity from Soft Gravitons

Mark Hertzberg
Tufts

Abstract:

We study all translationally and rotationally invariant local theories involving massless spin 2 and spin 1 particles that mediate long range forces, allowing for general energy relations and violation of boost invariance. Although gauge invariance is not a priori required to describe non Lorentz invariant theories, we first establish that locality requires a type of `soft gauge invariance'. Then by taking the soft graviton limit in scattering amplitudes, we prove that in addition to the usual requirement of universality of couplings, the special relativistic energy formula is also required and must be exact. We contrast this to the case of theories with only spin 1 particles, where, although we can still derive charge conservation from locality, special relativity can be easily violated. We provide indications that the entire structure of relativity can be built up from spin 2 in this fashion. This is work done with McCullen Sandora.