On the role of the parity violating Hojman–Holst term in gravity theories

Abstract

We study Parity Violating Gravity Theories whose gravitational Lagrangian is a generic function of the scalar curvature and the parity odd curvature pseudoscalar, commonly known as the Holst (or Hojmann) term. Generalizing some previous results in the literature, we explicitly show that if the Hessian of this function is non-degenerate, the initial non-Riemannian Theory is on-shell equivalent to a metric Scalar-Tensor Theory. The generic form of the kinetic coupling function and the scalar potential of the resulting Theory are explicitly found and reported.