Bigravity: Dead or Alive? – Adam Solomon
Date: Tue. December 1st, 2015, 11:30 am-12:30 pmLocation: Rockefeller 221
Spurred in large part by the discovery of the accelerating universe, recent years have seen tremendous advances in our understanding of alternatives to general relativity, particularly in the large-distance and low-curvature régimes. Looming large in this field is the recent development of a ghost-free, nonlinear theory of massive gravity and multimetric gravity (or equivalently, theories of interacting gravitons), which had proven elusive for the better part of seven decades. Nevertheless, both massive gravity and its generalization to a bimetric theory have run into potentially-deadly problems in the search for viable, self-accelerated cosmologies. I will summarize some of these issues, and then discuss possible ways out. I will conclude with my own outlook on this theory and where, if anywhere, we should go from here.