Gauging fractons and linearized gravity

Abstract: We consider the covariant gauge field theory of fractons, which describe a new type of quasiparticles exhibiting novel and nontrivial properties. In particular, we focus on the field theoretical peculiarities which characterize this theory, starting from the fact that, if we accept the paradigm that quantum field theories are defined by their symmetries, fractons unavoidably come together with linearized gravity. The standard Faddeev-Popov procedure to gauge fix the theory leads to a scalar gauge condition, which has two important drawbacks: it is frozen in the Landau gauge and linearized gravity cannot be obtained as a limit. In this paper we adopt a tensorially alternative gauge fixing, which avoids both problems. In particular, this allows to show that important physical features, like the counting of the degrees of freedom, do not depend on a particular gauge choice, as expected. Moreover, the resulting gauge fixed theory contains both fractons and linearized gravity as a limit, differently from the standard scalar choice.