English

Dark energy in multi-fractional spacetimes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-11-26 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study the possibility to obtain cosmological late-time acceleration from a geometry changing with the scale, in particular, in the so-called multifractional theories with qq-derivatives and with weighted derivatives. In the theory with qq-derivatives, the luminosity distance is the same as in general relativity and, therefore, geometry cannot act as dark energy. In the theory with weighted derivatives, geometry alone is able to sustain a late-time acceleration phase without fine tuning, while being compatible with structure-formation and big-bang nucleosynthesis bounds. This suggests to extend the theory, in a natural way, from just small-scale to also large-scale modifications of gravity. Surprisingly, the Hausdorff dimension of spacetime is constrained to be close to the topological dimension 4. After arguing that this finding might not be a numerical coincidence, we conclude that present-day acceleration could be regarded as the effect of a new restoration law for spacetime geometry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.02896,
  title  = {Dark energy in multi-fractional spacetimes},
  author = {Gianluca Calcagni and Antonio De Felice},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.02896},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. v2: discussion improved, results unchanged, typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:41:38.906Z