DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.149002

The intrinsic presence of ghosts in the symmetric teleparallel framework is elucidated. We illustrate our general arguments in $f(\mathbb{Q})$ theories by studying perturbations in the three inequivalent spatially flat cosmologies. Two of these branches exhibit reduced linear spectra, signalling they are infinitely strongly coupled. For the remaining branch we unveil the presence of seven gravitational degrees of freedom and show that at least one of them is a ghost. Our results rule out $f(\mathbb{Q})$ cosmologies and clarify the number of propagating degrees of freedom in these theories.

A bstract: Theories formulated in the arena of teleparallel geometries are generically plagued by ghost-like instabilities or other pathologies that are ultimately caused by the breaking of some symmetries. In this work, we construct a class of ghost-free theories based on a symmetry under Transverse Diffeomorphisms that is naturally realised in symmetric teleparallelism. We explicitly show their equivalence to a family of theories with an extra scalar field plus a global degree of freedom and how Horndeski theories and healthy couplings to matter fields can be readily accommodated.

We derive the exact gravitational wave solutions in a general class of quadratic metric-affine gauge gravity models. The Lagrangian includes all possible linear and quadratic invariants constructed from the torsion, nonmetricity and the curvature. The ansatz for the gravitational wave configuration and the properties of the wave solutions are patterned following the corresponding ansatz and the properties of the plane-fronted electromagnetic wave.