The late-time cosmological dynamics of disformal gravity are investigated using dynamical systems methods. It is shown that in the general case there are no stable attractors that screen fifth-forces locally and simultaneously describe a dark energy dominated universe. Viable scenarios have late-time properties that are independent of the disformal parameters and are identical to the equivalent conformal quintessence model. Our analysis reveals that configurations where the Jordan frame metric becomes singular are only reached in the infinite future, thus explaining the natural pathology resistance observed numerically by several previous works. The viability of models where this can happen is discussed in terms of both the cosmological dynamics and local phenomena. We identify a special parameter tuning such that there is a new fixed point that can match the presently observed dark energy density and equation of state. This model is unviable when the scalar couples to the visible sector but may provide a good candidate model for theories where only dark matter is disformally coupled.
Invertible disformal transformations are a useful tool to investigate ghost-free scalar-tensor theories. By performing a higher-derivative generalization of the invertible disformal transformation on Horndeski theories, we construct a novel class of ghost-free scalar-tensor theories, which we dub generalized disformal Horndeski theories. Specifically, these theories lie beyond the quadratic/cubic DHOST class. We explore cosmological perturbations to identify a subclass where gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light and clarify the conditions for the absence of ghost/gradient instabi…
We study the frame dependence/independence of cosmological observables under disformal transformations, extending the previous results regarding conformal transformations, and provide the correspondence between Jordan-frame and Einstein-frame variables. We consider quantities such as the gravitational constant in the Newtonian limit, redshift, luminosity and angular diameter distances, as well as the distance-duality relation. Also, the Boltzmann equation, the observed specific intensity, and the adiabaticity condition are discussed. Since the electromagnetic action changes under disformal tra…
Primordial cosmological perturbations are the seeds that were cultivated by inflation and the succeeding dynamical processes, eventually leading to the current Universe. In this work, we investigate the behavior of the gauge-invariant scalar and tensor perturbations under the general extended disformal transformation, namely, $g_{μν} \rightarrow A(X,Y,Z)g_{μν} + Φ_μΦ_ν$, where $X \equiv -\tfrac{1}{2}ϕ^{;μ}ϕ_{;μ}, Y \equiv ϕ^{;μ}X_{;μ}, Z \equiv X^{;μ}X_{;μ} $ and $Φ_μ\equiv Cϕ_{;μ} + DX_{;μ}$, with $C$ and $D$ being a general functional of $(ϕ,X,Y,Z)$. We find that the tensor perturbation is i…
We study a quintessence model for which the scalar field is disformally coupled to dark matter. The background mimics the LCDM cosmological evolution and the quintessence potential is not specified. A disformal effect due to the quintessential mass is seen in the growth rate of the cosmological structure on large scales. The disformal parameter renders no appreciable effect on the evolution of the total matter perturbation. An analysis of the conformal parameter and quintessential mass is investigated using the Redshift Space Distortion data to find the best-fit values that might explain the w…
Effective description of generalized disformal theories
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University(京都大学汤川理论物理研究所);Centro de Astrofísica e Gravitação - CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico - IST, Universidade de Lisboa - UL(里斯本大学技术研究所天体物理学与引力中心);Division of Liberal Arts, Kogakuin University(工学院大学人文学部)
In the context of scalar-tensor theories, the inclusion of new degrees of freedom coupled non-minimally to the gravitational sector might produce some appealing effects on the cosmic expansion history. We investigate this premise by including a canonical SU(2) Yang- Mills field to the total energy budget of the universe coupled to the standard quintessential field by a disformal transformation. From the dynamical system analysis, we study three cases of cosmological interest that span most of the physical phase space of the model: the uncoupled limit, the isotropic, and the Abelian cases. New …
We study the cosmological predictions of the dark D-brane model, in which dark matter resides on a D-brane moving in a higher-dimensional space. By construction, dark matter interacts only gravitationally with the standard model sector in this framework. The dark energy scalar field is associated with the position of the D-brane, and its dynamics is encoded in a Dirac-Born-Infeld action. On the other hand, dark matter is identified with matter on the D-brane, that naturally couples to dark energy \textit{via} a disformal coupling. We analyse the numerical evolution of the cosmological backgrou…
In this paper we investigate a class of phenomenologically viable $F(R,{\cal G})$ theories that are able to avoid the cosmological constant issue. While the absence of ghosts and other kinds of instability issues is of prime importance, other reasonable requirements such as vanishing effective (low curvature) cosmological constant, including the flat space as a stable vacuum solution, are also imposed on the viable models. These are free of the cosmological constant problem thanks to the following outstanding feature: the de Sitter space is an attractor of the asymptotic cosmological dynamics,…
In this work we present a further investigation about Teleparallel Gravity Cosmology. We demonstrate that according the current astrophysical data (CC+Pantheon+BAO samplers with late universe measurements SH0ES+H0LiCOW), an $f(T,B)$ theory can provide another interpretation to the oscillatory behaviour of the dark energy equation of state when applied to late times. The four $f(T,B)$ cosmological viable models proposed here can undergo an epoch of late-time acceleration and reproduce quintessence and phantom regimes with a transition along the phantom-divided line, making this theory a good ap…
We investigate the parameter distributions of the viable generalized scalar-tensor theory with conventional dust matter after GW170817 in a model-independent way. We numerically construct the models by computing the time evolution of a scalar field, which leads to a positive definite second-order Hamiltonian and are consistent with the observed Hubble parameter. We show the model parameter distributions in the degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theory, and its popular subclasses, e.g., Horndeski and GLPV theories, etc.. We find that 1) the Planck mass run rate, $α_M$, is insensitive…
Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing, National Observatory of Athens(雅典国家天文台天文学、天体物理学、空间应用与遥感研究所);Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Católica del Norte(北天主教学院数学系);CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学院星系与宇宙学重点实验室,中国科学技术大学天文与空间科学学院)
In this work we review the issue of imposing the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor as a necessary condition to recover the equivalence between the unimodular gravity and General Relativity (GR) equipped with a cosmological constant. This procedure is usually interpreted as an {\it ad hoc} imposition on the unimodular theory's structure. Whereas the consequences of avoiding the conservation of the total energy-momentum tensor has been already introduced in the literature, it has been not widely explored so far. We study an expanding universe sourced by a single effective perfect fluid …