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Dark energy constraints have forced viable alternatives that differ substantially from a cosmological constant Lambda to have an equation of state w that evolves across the phantom divide set by Lambda. Naively, crossing this divide makes…
In the Horndeski's most general scalar-tensor theories with second-order field equations, we derive the conditions for the avoidance of ghosts and Laplacian instabilities associated with scalar, tensor, and vector perturbations in the…
We consider a mimetic set up in which the mimetic scalar is coupled to a vector field. It is shown that such a field with a time-like component does not contribute to the background equations and yet produces healthy isocurvature…
We study stability of singularity-free cosmological solutions with positive cosmological constant based on projectable Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz (HL) theory. In HL theory, the isotropic and homogeneous cosmological solutions with bounce can be…
We propose a bigravity analogue of the $F(R)$ gravity. Our construction is based on recent ghost-free massive bigravity where additional scalar fields are added and the corresponding conformal transformation is implemented. It turns out…
We study gravity coupled to a cosmological constant and a scale but not conformally invariant sector. In Minkowski vacuum, scale invariance is spontaneously broken. We consider small fluctuations around the Minkowski vacuum. At the…
We review some of the recent results which can be useful for better understanding of the problem of stability of vacuum and in general classical solutions in higher derivative quantum gravity. The fourth derivative terms in the purely…
Scalar perturbations can grow during a phantomic cosmological phase as the big rip is approached, in spite of the high accelerated expansion regime, if the equation of state is such that $\frac{p}{\rho} = \alpha < - {5/3}$. It is shown that…
The ghost-free theory of massive gravity with two dynamical metrics has been shown to produce viable cosmological expansion, where the late-time acceleration of the Universe is due to the finite range of the gravitational interaction rather…
In this article, we study the stability of black hole solutions found in the context of dilatonic Horava-Lifshitz gravity in $1+1$ dimensions by means of the quasinormal modes approach. In order to find the corresponding quasinormal modes,…
Understanding the role of higher derivatives is probably one of the most relevant questions in quantum gravity theory. Already at the semiclassical level, when gravity is a classical background for quantum matter fields, the action of…
We study the background cosmology of the ghost-free, bimetric theory of gravity. We perform an extensive statistical analysis of the model using both frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and employ the constraints on the expansion history of…
Recently, a class of theories of massive gravity has been shown to be ghost-free. We study the spherically symmetric solutions in the bigravity formulation of such theories. In general, the solutions admit both a Lorentz invariant and a…
We argue that all homogeneous and isotropic solutions in nonlinear massive gravity are unstable. For this purpose, we study the propagating modes on a Bianchi type--I manifold. We analyze their kinetic terms and dispersion relations as the…
A nonlocal gravity model based on $\frac1{\square} R$ achieves the phenomenological goals of generating cosmic acceleration without dark energy and of suppressing the growth of perturbations compared to the $\Lambda$CDM model. Although the…
A number of stability criteria exist for dark energy theories, associated with requiring the absence of ghost, gradient and tachyonic instabilities. Tachyonic instabilities are the least well explored of these in the dark energy context and…
Recently, the construction of ghost-free nonlinear massive spin-2 interactions solved a long outstanding problem in classical field theory. The consistent formulation requires a second rank-two tensor (or metric) and therefore has the form…
This is a brief review of modified gravity cosmologies. Generically extensions of gravity action involve higher derivative terms, which can result in ghosts and instabilities. There are three ways to circumvent this: Chern-Simons terms,…
In this paper we construct a class of Degenerate Higher-Order Scalar-Tensor (DHOST) theories with an extra scalar field, which admits viable solutions of bouncing universe satisfying the following requirements: (i) absence of…
We revisit the two-field mimetic gravity model with shift symmetries recently proposed in the literature, especially the problems of degrees of freedom and stabilities. We first study the model at the linear cosmological perturbation level…