Matter induced bimetric actions for gravity

The gravitational effective average action is studied in a bimetric truncation with a nontrivial background field dependence, and its renormalization group flow due to a scalar multiplet coupled to gravity is derived. Neglecting the metric contributions to the corresponding beta functions, the analysis of its fixed points reveals that, even on the new enlarged theory space which includes bimetric action functionals, the theory is asymptotically safe in the large N expansion. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.