This book is organised as follows: Chapter 1: Introduction, which introduces to known field theories in cosmology and to massive gravity, the following five chapters are presenting the main results of this dissertation. Chapter 2: Cosmology of massive gravity in the decoupling limit, Chapter 3: Proxy theory (being a subclass of the Horndeski theories), Chapter 4: Superluminal propagation in Galileon models, Chapter 5: Quantum corrections: natural versus non-natural, and Chapter 6: Renormalization beyond the decoupling limit of massive gravity. The Appendix presents useful formulas, e.g. concerning dimensional regularization. Claudia de Rham wrote the Supervisor’s foreword to this dissertation.
Publisher’s description: “This work is a detailed study of both the theoretical and phenomenological consequences of a massive graviton, within the ghost-free theory of massive gravity, the de Rham-Gabadadze-Tolley (dRGT) theory. Its aim is to test the physical viability of the theory. It begins by putting constraints on the parameters of the theory in the decoupling limit based on purely theoretical grounds, like classical stability in the cosmological evolution of self-accelerating and degravitating solutions. The author then constructs a proxy theory to massive gravity from the decoupling limit resulting in non-minimally coupled scalar-tensor interactions as an example of a subclass of Horndeski theories. Lastly, she addresses the natural question of whether the parameters introduced in the dRGT theory are subject to strong renormalization by quantum loops and shows how the non-renormalization theorem protects the graviton mass from quantum corrections. Beyond the decoupling limit the quantum corrections are found to be proportional to the graviton mass, proving its technical naturalness.”
Another recent paper on the same topic by the author is: [C. De Rham et al., “On couplings to matter in massive (bi-)gravity”, Classical Quantum Gravity 32, No. 3, Article ID 035022, 29 p. (2015; Zbl 1312.83027)].