UC Santa Barbara

This Letter refines arguments forbidding nonlinear dynamical gravity from appearing in the low energy effective description of field theories with local kinematics, even for those with instantaneous long-range interactions. Specifically, we note that gravitational theories with universal coupling to energy-an intrinsically nonlinear phenomenon-are characterized by Hamiltonians that are pure boundary terms on shell. In order for this to be the low energy effective description of a field theory with local kinematics, all bulk dynamics must be frozen and, thus, irrelevant to the construction. The result applies to theories defined either on a lattice or in the continuum, and requires neither Lorentz invariance nor translation invariance.