Standard general relativity from Chern-Simons gravity

Chern-Simons models for gravity are interesting because they provide a truly gauge-invariant action principle in the fiber-bundle sense. So far, their main drawback has largely been its perceived remoteness from standard General Relativity, based on the presence of higher powers of the curvature in the Lagrangian (except, remarkably, for three-dimensional spacetime). Here we report on a simple model that suggests a mechanism by which standard General Relativity in five-dimensional spacetime may indeed emerge at a special critical point in the space of couplings, where additional degrees of freedom and corresponding "anomalous" Gauss-Bonnet constraints drop out from the Chern-Simons action. To achieve this goal, both the Lie algebra p and the symmetric theta-invariant tensor that define the Chern-Simons Lagrangian are constructed by means of the Lie algebra S-expansion method with a suitable finite Abelian semigroup S. The results are generalized to arbitrary odd dimensions, and the possible extension to the case of eleven-dimensional supergravity is briefly discussed. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.