On the stability of fracton gravity

Abstract: We study the stability of fracton gravity, a variant of linearized gravity where the gauge symmetry is restricted to longitudinal diffeomorphisms. These transformations can be connected to a spacetime generalization of dipole symmetry, hence the tag fracton. We find that fracton gravity features an instability in the spin-1 sector corresponding to solutions with growing amplitude. This dynamical instability can be removed by tuning the couplings of the theory. Nonetheless, the Hamiltonian for the spin-1 modes remains always unbounded from below when evaluated on the classical solutions. We find no other sources of instability in the spin-2 or spin-0 sectors. We analyze in detail the canonical formulation and the constraints arguing that neither auxiliary fields nor gauge-fixing conditions can be employed to remove the problematic vector modes or stabilize them.