Symmetron Cosmology

By Kurt Hinterbichler, J. Khoury, Aaron Levy, A. Matas. 2011

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The symmetron is a scalar field associated with the dark sector whose coupling to matter depends on the ambient matter density. The symmetron is decoupled and screened in regions of high density, thereby satisfying local constraints from tests of gravity, but couples with gravitational strength in regions of low density, such as the cosmos. In this paper we derive the cosmological expansion history in the presence of a symmetron field, tracking the evolution through the inflationary, radiationand matter-dominated epochs, using a combination of analytical approximations and numerical integration. For a broad range of initial conditions at the onset of inflation, the scalar field reaches its symmetry-breaking vacuum by the present epoch, as assumed in the local analysis of spherically-symmetric solutions and tests of gravity. For the simplest form of the potential, the energy scale is too small for the symmetron to act as dark energy, hence we must add a cosmological constant to drive late-time cosmic acceleration. We briefly discuss a class of generalized, non-renormalizable potentials that can have a greater impact on the late-time cosmology, though cosmic acceleration requires a delicate tuning of parameters in this case. 1 ar X iv :1 10 7. 21 12 v1 [ as tr oph .C O ] 1 1 Ju l 2 01 1

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61bba98091fd2d77efd04955fec7b4150bf38d31

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Citations in the corpus

Horndeski theory and beyond: a review (2019, background): “(There are other screening mechanisms called symmetron [217, 218] and k-Mouflage models [219], both of which effectively suppress the coupling to matter.”
hi_class: Horndeski in the Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (2016, background): “[19, 20], kinetic gravity braiding [21–23], covariant galileons [11, 24], disformal and Dirac-Born-Infeld gravity [25–27], Chameleons [28, 29], symmetrons [30, 31], Gauss-Bonnet couplings [32] and models screening the cosmological constant [33, 34].”
Beyond the Cosmological Standard Model (2014, unknown): “One way of doing this is the symmetron mechanism [192, 411], in which the coupling of the scalar to matter is proportional to the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the field.”