Multigravity from a discrete extra dimension

Multigravity theories are constructed from the discretization of the extra dimension of five-dimensional gravity. Using an ADM decomposition, the discretization is performed while maintaining the four-dimensional diffeomorphism invariance on each site. We relate the Goldstone bosons used to realize nonlinearly general covariance in discretized gravity to the shift fields of the higher-dimensional metric. We investigate the scalar excitations of the resulting theory and show the absence of ghosts and massive modes; this is due to a local symmetry inherited from the reparametrization invariance along the fifth dimension.