Giorgi Tukhashvili

We study the New Massive Gravity extended by the curvature cubed invariant and the Cosmological Constant using the tree-level scattering amplitudes on a maximally symmetric space-time. We identify the parameter space, consisting of the ratio between C.C. and graviton mass squared and the relative coupling strength between curvature squared and cubed invariants, for which the massive spin-2 is a ghost. Different phases of this model are also discussed.

Evgeny Skvortsov, Tung Tran, Mirian Tsulaia

Chiral Higher Spin Gravity is unique in being the smallest higher spin extension of gravity and in having a simple local action both in flat and (anti)-de Sitter spaces. It must be a closed subsector of any other higher spin theory in four dimensions, which makes it an important building block and benchmark. Using the flat space version for simplicity, we perform a thorough study of quantum corrections in Chiral Theory, which strengthen our earlier results arXiv:1805.00048. Even though the interactions are naively non-renormalizable, we show that there are no UV-divergences in two-, three- and four-point amplitudes at one loop thanks to the higher spin symmetry. We also give arguments that the AdS Chiral Theory should exhibit similar properties. It is shown that Chiral Theory admits Yang-Mills gaugings with $U(N)$, $SO(N)$ and $USp(N)$ groups, which is reminiscent of the Chan-Paton symmetry in string theory.