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We review the evidence for recently accelerating cosmological expansion or "dark energy", either a negative pressure constituent in General Relativity (Dark Energy) or modified gravity (Dark Gravity), without any Dark Energy constituent. If…
The universal character of the gravitational interaction provided by the equivalence principle motivates a geometrical description of gravity. The standard formulation of General Relativity \`a la Einstein attributes gravity to the…
We revisit the status of scalar-tensor theories with applications to dark energy in the aftermath of the gravitational wave signal GW170817 and its optical counterpart GRB170817A. At the level of the cosmological background, we identify a…
Cosmic acceleration is widely believed to require either a source of negative pressure (i.e., dark energy), or a modification of gravity, which necessarily implies new degrees of freedom beyond those of Einstein gravity. In this paper we…
We consider a general class of vector-tensor theories of gravity and show that solutions with accelerated expansion and a future type III singularity are a common feature in these models. We also show that there are only six vector-tensor…
A certain vector-tensor theory is revisited. Our attention is focused on cosmology. Against previous suggestions based on preliminary studies, it is shown that, if the energy density of the vector field is large enough to play the role of…
The acceleration of the universe can be explained either through dark energy or through the modification of gravity on large scales. In this paper we investigate modified gravity models and compare their observable predictions with dark…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity that embrace conformal coupling to the scalar curvature are the focal point of cosmology on discussions of inflation and late-time accelerating universe. Although there exists a stringent nucleo-synthesis…
In this letter, we consider the possibility of reconciling metric theories of gravitation with violation of the conservation of energy-momentum. Under some circumstances, this can be achieved in the context of unimodular gravity, and it…
We present a bi-metric theory of gravity containing a length scale of galactic size. For distances less than this scale the theory satisfies the standard tests of General Relativity. For distances greater than this scale the theory yields…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
We discuss some of the issues which we encounter when we try to invoke the scalar-tensor theories of gravitation as a theoretical basis of quintessence. One of the advantages of appealing to these theories is that they allow us to implement…
A simple gravitational model with torsion is studied, and it is suggested that it could explain the dark matter and dark energy in the universe. It can be reinterpreted as a model using the Einstein gravitational equations where spacetime…
As we now know, there are indeed at least two major difficulties with General Relativity (GR). The first one is related with its incompatibility with quantum mechanics, in the absence of a widely accepted consistent theory that combines the…
It is shown that gravitation naturally emerges from the standard model of particle physics if local scale invariance is imposed in the context of a single conformal (Weyl-symmetric) theory. Gravitation is then conformally-related to the…
General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at macroscopic distance scales and near event horizons. These arise from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom in the extended effective field theory of gravity generated by the…
We discuss the motivation for high accuracy relativistic gravitational experiments in the Solar System and complementary cosmological tests. We focus our attention on the issue of distinguishing a generic scalar-theory of gravity as the…
While observational cosmology has shown tremendous growth over the last decade, deep mysteries continue to haunt our theoretical understanding of the ingredients of the concordance cosmological model, which are mainly `dark'. More than 95…
A discrete space-time structure lying at about the Planck scale may become manifest in the form of very small violations of the conservation of the matter energy-momentum tensor. In order to include such kind of violations, forbidden within…