Conformal Gravity and Extensions of Critical Gravity

Abstract: Higher-order curvature corrections involving the conformally-invariant Weyl-squared action have played a role in two recent investigations of four-dimensional gravity; in critical gravity, where it is added to the standard cosmological Einstein-Hilbert action with a coefficient tuned to make the massive ghostlike spin-2 excitations massless, and in a pure Weyl-squared action considered by Maldacena, where the massive spin-2 modes are removed by the imposition of boundary conditions. We exhibit the connections between the two approaches, and we also generalise critical gravity to a wider class of Weyl-squared modifications to cosmological Einstein gravity where one can eliminate the massive ghostlike spin-2 modes by means of boundary conditions. The cosmological constant plays a crucial role in the discussion, since there is then a "window" of negative mass-squared spin-2 modes around AdS_4 that are not tachyonic. We also construct analogous conformal and non-conformal gravities in six dimensions.