Emergence of Lorentzian signature and scalar gravity

In recent years, a growing momentum has been gained by the emergent gravity framework. Within the latter, the very concepts of geometry and gravitational interaction are not seen as elementary aspects of nature but rather as collective phenomena associated to the dynamics of more fundamental objects. In this paper we want to further explore this possibility by proposing a model of emergent Lorentzian signature and scalar gravity. Assuming that the dynamics of the fundamental objects can give rise in first place to a Riemannian manifold and a set of scalar fields we show how time (in the sense of hyperbolic equations) can emerge as a property of perturbations dynamics around some specific class of solutions of the field equations. Moreover, we show that these perturbations can give rise to a spin-0 gravity via a suitable redefinition of the fields that identifies the relevant degrees of freedom. In particular, we find that our model gives rise to Nordström gravity. Since this theory is invariant under general coordinate transformations, this also shows how diffeomorphism invariance (albeit of a weaker form than the one of general relativity) can emerge from much simpler systems.