English

No Slip Gravity

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2018-08-01 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

A subclass of the Horndeski modified gravity theory we call No Slip Gravity has particularly interesting properties: 1) a speed of gravitational wave propagation equal to the speed of light, 2) equality between the effective gravitational coupling strengths to matter and light, GmatterG_{\rm matter} and GlightG_{\rm light}, hence no slip between the metric potentials, yet difference from Newton's constant, and 3) suppressed growth to give better agreement with galaxy clustering observations. We explore the characteristics and implications of this theory, and project observational constraints. We also give a simple expression for the ratio of the gravitational wave standard siren distance to the photon standard candle distance, in this theory and others, and enable a direct comparison of modified gravity in structure growth and in gravitational waves, an important crosscheck.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.01503,
  title  = {No Slip Gravity},
  author = {Eric V. Linder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01503},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, 6 figures; v2 corrected typos, added reference; v3 corrected typo in Eq 10, updated references

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:36:45.917Z