Events

Date: 2 June 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Location: MB503

The premise of massive gravity is simple - adding a mass term to the graviton action. Yet it was only in 2010 that a permissible non-linear massive gravity Lagrangian, now known as the dRGT Lagrangian, was first written down. Since then, dRGT theory has generated considerable interest, but many fundamental questions about it remain unanswered. In this talk, I will briefly review the motivations and history of massive gravity, before moving on to discuss some of our recent progress on understanding its dynamics. We shall learn how to study the characteristics of the massive graviton, seeing that the familiar helicity-2 components remain on the usual light cone. The formulation that lets us perform this analysis will also turn out to be appropriate for a (probably) well-posed initial value problem. This will let us put dRGT on a computer, and marvel at the complicated things that happen when we try to model gravitational collapse. Most of the time, the result will turn out to look very different from a standard GR black hole.