No Arabic abstract
The recently suggested generalized unimodular gravity theory, which was originally put forward as a model of dark energy, can serve as a model of cosmological inflation driven by the effective perfect fluid -- the dark purely gravitational sector of the theory. Its excitations are scalar gravitons which can generate, in the domain free from ghost and gradient instabilities, the red tilted primordial power spectrum of CMB perturbations matching with observations. The reconstruction of the parametric dependence of the action of the theory in the early inflationary Universe is qualitatively sketched from the cosmological data. The alternative possibilities of generating the cosmological acceleration or quantum transition to the general relativistic phase of the theory are also briefly discussed.
We consider modifications of general relativity characterized by a special noncovariant constraint on metric coefficients, which effectively generates a perfect-fluid type of matter stress tensor in Einstein equations. Such class of modified gravity models includes recently suggested generalized unimodular gravity (GUMG) theory and its simplest version -- unimodular gravity (UMG). We make these gravity models covariant by introducing four Stueckelberg fields and show that in the case of generalized unimodular gravity three out of these fields dynamically decouple. This means that the covariant form of generalized unimodular gravity is dynamically equivalent to k-essence theory with a specific Lagrangian which can be reconstructed from the parameters of GUMG theory. We provide the examples, where such reconstruction can be done explicitly, and briefly discuss theories beyond GUMG, related to self-gravitating media models. Also we compare GUMG k-inflation with cuscuton models of dynamically inert k-essence field and discuss motivation for GUMG coming from effective field theory.
We study cosmological perturbation theory within the framework of unimodular gravity. We show that the Lagrangian constraint on the determinant of the metric required by unimodular gravity leads to an extra constraint on the gauge freedom of the metric perturbations. Although the main equation of motion for the gravitational potential remains the same, the shift variable, which is gauge artifact in General Relativity, cannot be set to zero in unimodular gravity. This non-vanishing shift variable affects the propagation of photons throughout the cosmological evolution and therefore modifies the Sachs-Wolfe relation between the relativistic gravitational potential and the microwave temperature anisotropies. However, for adiabatic fluctuations the difference between the result in General Relativity and unimodular gravity is suppressed on large angular scales. Thus, no strong constraints on the theory can be derived.
We discuss unimodular gravity at a classical level, and in terms of its extension into the UV through an appropriate path integral representation. Classically, unimodular gravity is simply a gauge fixed version of General Relativity (GR), and as such it yields identical dynamics and physical predictions. We clarify this and explain why there is no sense in which it can bring a new perspective to the cosmological constant problem. The quantum equivalence between unimodular gravity and GR is more of a subtle question, but we present an argument that suggests one can always maintain the equivalence up to arbitrarily high momenta. As a corollary to this, we argue that whenever inequivalence is seen at the quantum level, that just means we have defined two different quantum theories that happen to share a classical limit.
We investigate inflation and its scalar perturbation driven by a massive scalar field in the unimodular theory of gravity. We introduce a parameter $xi$ with which the theory is invariant under general unimodular coordinate transformations. When the unimodular parameter is $xi=6$, the classical picture of inflation is reproduced in the unimodular theory because it recovers the background equations of the standard theory of general relativity. We show that for $xi=6$, the theory is equivalent to the standard theory of general relativity at the perturbation level. Unimodular gravity constrains the gauge degree of freedom in the scalar perturbation, but the perturbation equations are similar to those in general relativity. For $xi eq 6$, we derive the power spectrum and the spectral index, and obtain the unimodular correction to the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Depending on the value of $xi$, the correction can either raise or lower the value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio.
The article presents modeling of inflationary scenarios for the first time in the $f(R,T)$ theory of gravity. We assume the $f(R,T)$ functional from to be $R + eta T$, where $R$ denotes the Ricci scalar, $T$ the trace of the energy-momentum tensor and $eta$ the model parameter (constant). We first investigated an inflationary scenario where the inflation is driven purely due to geometric effects outside of GR. We found the inflation observables to be independent of the number of e-foldings in this setup. The computed value of the spectral index is consistent with latest Planck 2018 dataset while the scalar to tensor ratio is a bit higher. We then proceeded to analyze the behavior of an inflation driven by $f(R,T)$ gravity coupled with a real scalar field. By taking the slow-roll approximation, we generated interesting scenarios where a Klein Gordon potential leads to observationally consistent inflation observables. Our results makes it clear-cut that in addition to the Ricci scalar and scalar fields, the trace of energy momentum tensor also play a major role in driving inflationary scenarios.