Dark energy or modified gravity? An effective field theory approach

By Jolyon K. Bloomfield, '. Flanagan, Minjoon Park, S. Watson. 2012

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We take an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach to unifying existing proposals for the origin of cosmic acceleration and its connection to cosmological observations. Building on earlier work where EFT methods were used with observations to constrain the background evolution, we extend this program to the level of the EFT of the cosmological perturbations — following the example from the EFT of Inflation. Within this framework, we construct the general theory around an assumed background which will typically be chosen to mimic ΛCDM, and identify the parameters of interest for constraining dark energy and modified gravity models with observations. We discuss the similarities to the EFT of Inflation, but we also identify a number of subtleties including the relationship between the scalar perturbations and the Goldstone boson of the spontaneously broken time translations. We present formulae that relate the parameters of the fundamental Lagrangian to the speed of sound, anisotropic shear stress, effective Newtonian constant, and Caldwell's parameter, emphasizing the connection to observations. It is anticipated that this framework will be of use in constraining individual models, as well as for placing model-independent constraints on dark energy and modified gravity model building.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/caf2c4c5fbaabdda0945d98075db586ca73d7093

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

hi_class: Horndeski in the Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (2016, background): “2 Description of Perturbation Dynamics Perhaps the most productive recent idea in dark-energy cosmology theory was to exploit the spatial homogeneity of the FRW background, leading to the approach of Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy (EFT) [55–57].”
A unifying description of dark energy (2014, methodology): “This approach was initially inspired by the so-called effective field theory (EFT) formalism, pioneered in [2, 3] for inflation and in [4] for minimally coupled dark energy, and later developed in the context of dark energy [5, 6, 7] (see also [8] for a recent review and e.”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “6 Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy One of the most productive recent ideas in dark-energy cosmology has been the employing of effective field-theory methods originally developed for inflation [350, 304] to limit the space of possible parameterisations of gravity to that obtainable from local ac”
Effective field theory of cosmological perturbations (2013, background): “also [32, 88, 96]), here we limit ourselves to the operators of the second line of (1): those that do not give higher derivatives in the equations of motion.”
Essential Building Blocks of Dark Energy (2013, methodology): “The phenomenology of the operators appearing in action (2) was also studied in [12].”
Maximal freedom at minimum cost: linear large-scale structure in general modifications of gravity (2014, background): “[35, 37] m(2)0Ω+ M̄ 2 2 m 2 0Ω̇ + ̇̄ M2 2 2c+ 4M 4 2 −M̄3 1 −m(2)0Ω̇ −M̄2 2”
Dark energy and modified gravity in degenerate higher-order scalar–tensor (DHOST) theories: A review (2018, background): “To do so, it is very useful to resort to the unified formalism providing an effective description of Dark Energy and Modified Gravity, which has been developed in a series of papers, especially [35–38] (see also [39, 40] and [41, 42] for related or alternative approaches).”
Cosmological tests of modified gravity (2015, background): “3 we showed that Vainshtein screening of dark matter particles depends on their cosmic web morphology [315]; halo particles are screened while filament, void, and wall particles are not, reflecting the dimensionality dependence of the Vainshtein mechanism [181, 245].”
Extended scalar-tensor theories of gravity (2016, methodology): “Then, we turn to cosmology and examine the possible relevance of EST theories for dark energy, using the language of the Effective Field Theory (EFT) of dark energy [17, 18].”