Solar System constraints to general f(R) gravity

By T. Chiba, Tristan L. Smith, A. Erickcek. 2006

295 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been proposed that cosmic acceleration or inflation can be driven by replacing the Einstein-Hilbert action of general relativity with a function f(R) of the Ricci scalar R. Such f(R) gravity theories have been shown to be equivalent to scalar-tensor theories of gravity that are incompatible with Solar System tests of general relativity, as long as the scalar field propagates over Solar System scales. Specifically, the parameterized post-Newtonian (PPN) parameter in the equivalent scalar-tensor theory is gamma=1/2, which is far outside the range allowed by observations. In response to a flurry of papers that questioned the equivalence of f(R) theory to scalar-tensor theories, it was recently shown explicitly, without resorting to the scalar-tensor equivalence, that the vacuum field equations for 1/R gravity around a spherically symmetric mass also yield gamma=1/2. Here we generalize this analysis to f(R) gravity and enumerate the conditions that, when satisfied by the function f(R), lead to the prediction that gamma=1/2.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c32e3af42d07a168c0acaa6ec0e496ff0b15c37f

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Citations in the corpus

Born–Infeld inspired modifications of gravity (2017, background): “This typically involves a number of problems such as higher-order field equations, which usually entail the presence of ghost-like instabilities [341, 340, 266, 107], or the difficulty to make these models compatible with solar system tests due to the existence of new degrees of freedom [270, 108]1.”
Stellar structure models in modified theories of gravity: Lessons and challenges (2019, result): “Thus, for any finite value of the metric function at the center of the star the equation above implies the result (42), and thus the inconsistency with Solar System experiments, as discussed in [107, 109, 115, 116].”
f(R) Theories Of Gravity (2008, methodology): “Chiba’s result based on the scalar-tensor equivalence eventually turns out to be valid subject to certain assumptions which are not always satisfied (Chiba et al., 2007; Jin et al., 2006; Olmo, 2007) — see below.”