On power-counting renormalizability of Ho\v{r}ava gravity with detailed balance

Understand

We consider the version of Ho\v{r}ava gravity where "detailed balance" is consistently implemented, so as to limit the huge proliferation of couplings in the full theory and obtain healthy dynamics at low energy.

• Since a superpotential which is third-order in spatial derivatives is not sufficient to guarantee the power-counting renormalizability of the spin-0 graviton, one needs to go an order beyond in derivatives, building a superpotential up to fourth-order spatial derivatives.
• Here we perturb the action to quadratic order around flat space and show that the power-counting renormalizability of the spin-0 graviton is achieved only by setting to zero a specific coupling of the theory, while the spin-2 graviton is always power-counting renormalizable for any choice of the couplings.
• This result raises serious doubts about the use of detailed balance.