Curing singularities in cosmological evolution of F(R) gravity

By Stephen A. Appleby, R. Battye, A. Starobinsky. 2009

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study F(R) modified gravity models which are capable of driving the accelerating epoch of the Universe at the present time whilst not destroying the standard Big Bang and inflationary cosmology. Recent studies have shown that a weak curvature singularity with |R| → ∞ can arise generically in viable F(R) models of present dark energy (DE) signaling an internal incompleteness of these models. In this work we study how this problem is cured by adding a quadratic correction with a sufficiently small coefficient to the F(R) function at large curvatures. At the same time, this correction eliminates two more serious problems of previously constructed viable F(R) DE models: unboundedness of the mass of a scalar particle (scalaron) arising in F(R) gravity and the scalaron overabundance problem. Such carefully constructed models can also yield both an early time inflationary epoch and a late time de Sitter phase with vastly different values of R. The reheating epoch in these combined models of primordial and present dark energy is completely different from that of the old R+R2/6M2 inflationary model, mainly due to the fact that values of the effective gravitational constant at low and intermediate curvatures are different for positive and negative R. This changes the number of e-folds during the observable part of inflation that results in a different value of the primordial power spectrum index.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d4c65cceb2192054bf7a3d22f13172bd12bbb92

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Citations in the corpus

f(R) Theories (2010, background): “84) plus the R(2) term cannot relate the epoch of two accelerations smoothly [37].”
A polynomial f(R) inflation model (2013, background): “In [23] the classical and quantum stability of f(R) model requires that f ′(R) > 0, and f ′′(R) > 0.”
Modified Gravity and Cosmology (2011, background): “Further, one can show that the addition of higher powers of R to the gravitational Lagrangian again helps defend it from instability [968, 421, 970].”