Self-Protection of Massive Cosmological Gravitons

Abstract: Relevant deformations of gravity present an exciting window of opportunity to probe the rigidity of gravity on cosmological scales. For a single-graviton theory, the leading relevant deformation constitutes a graviton mass term. In this paper, we investigate the classical and quantum stability of massive cosmological gravitons on generic Friedman backgrounds. For a Universe expanding towards a de Sitter epoch, we find that massive cosmological gravitons are self-protected against unitarity violations by a strong coupling phenomenon.