Gravity = Yang–Mills

Abstract

This essay’s title is justified by discussing a class of Yang–Mills-type theories of which standard Yang–Mills theories are special cases but which is broad enough to include gravity as a double field theory. We use the framework of homotopy algebras, where conventional Yang–Mills theory is the tensor product K⊗g of a ‘kinematic’ algebra K with a color Lie algebra g. The larger class of Yang–Mills-type theories are given by the tensor product of K with more general Lie-type algebras, of which K itself is an example, up to anomalies that can be canceled for the tensor product with a second copy K¯. Gravity is then given by K⊗K¯.