Chiral perturbation theory for GR

Abstract: We describe a new perturbation theory for General Relativity, with the chiral first-order Einstein-Cartan action as the starting point. Our main result is a new gauge-fixing procedure that eliminates the connection-to-connection propagator. All other known first-order formalisms have this propagator non-zero, which significantly increases the combinatorial complexity of any perturbative calculation. In contrast, in the absence of the connection-to-connection propagator, our formalism leads to an effective description in which only the metric (or tetrad) propagates, there are only cubic and quartic vertices, but some vertex legs are special in that they cannot be connected by the propagator. The new formalism is the gravity analog of the well-known and powerful chiral description of Yang-Mills theory.