Hans Christian Öttinger

The concept of freely falling frames suggests that gravity exhibits a local Lorentz gauge symmetry and requires a background Minkowski reference frame. The gauge vector fields of a Yang-Mills-type theory can be constructed from the transformations to these local freely falling frames, thereby leading to a composite theory of gravity. We propose coordinate conditions under which an exact black-hole solution can be obtained. Our analysis of planar gravitational waves reveals that, despite the large symmetry group, composite gravity possesses only four physical degrees of freedom. We elaborate a Hamiltonian formulation of composite gravity, derive the full set of constraints for the nonlinear theory, and outline the pathway toward its quantization.