Intrinsic cutoff and acausality for massive spin 2 fields coupled to electromagnetism

We couple a massive spin 2 particle to electromagnetism. By introducing new, redundant degrees of freedom using the Stuckelberg formalism, we extract an intrinsic, model independent UV cutoff of the effective field theory describing this system. The cutoff signals both the onset of a strongly interacting dynamical regime and a finite size for the spin 2 particle. We show that the existence of a cutoff is strictly connected to other pathologies of interacting high-spin fields, such as the Velo-Zwanziger acausality. We also briefly comment on implications of this result for the detection of high spin states and on its possible generalization to arbitrary spin. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.