Research Project: “Minimal Massive Gravity” is an extension of Einstein gravity in 3-dimensions with higher derivative terms. Remarkably, it has physically well-defined bulk and boundary descriptions and hence it is a potentially useful toy model for examining properties of quantum gravity. However, it also has a rather peculiar property; its field equation, does not come from the variation of a local action of the metric alone. Consequently, the Bianchi identity on its own does not guarantee the consistency of this equation. Nevertheless, this equation still makes sense on-shell since its divergence vanishes if one uses the field equation again. This novel mechanism is called the "third way consistency". We would like to construct supersymmetric extension of this model. Due to the lack of an action, we will work with equations of motion and demand bosonic and fermionic equations to be mapped to each other under supersymmetry. Once achieved, this will be the first example of a supersymmetric third way consistent gravity theory.

Research Team: Nihat Sadik Deger (Bogazici University) and Jan Rosseel (University of Vienna)

Research Stays: January 31 - February 28, 2022 and May 22 to June 5, 2022