Related papers: Extended mimetic gravity: Hamiltonian analysis and…
Degenerate scalar-tensor theories of gravity extend general relativity by a single degree of freedom, despite their equations of motion being higher than second order. In some cases, this is a mere consequence of a disformal field…
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,…
We study the stability of a recently proposed model of scalar-field matter called mimetic dark matter or imperfect dark matter. It has been known that mimetic matter with higher derivative terms suffers from gradient instabilities in scalar…
The best motivated alternatives to general relativity are scalar-tensor theories, in which the gravitational interaction is mediated by one or several scalar fields together with the usual graviton. The analysis of their various…
The Aether Scalar Tensor (AeST) theory is an extension of General Relativity (GR), proposed for addressing galactic and cosmological observations without dark matter. By casting the AeST theory into a $3+1$ form, we determine its full…
We review how the (absence of) Ostrogradsky instability manifests itself in theories with multiple fields. It has recently been appreciated that when multiple fields are present, the existence of higher derivatives may not automatically…
We perform detailed investigation of cosmological perturbations in f(T) theory of gravity coupled with scalar field. Our work emphasizes on the way to gauge fix the theory and we examine all possible modes of perturbations up to second…
We investigate instabilities and their regularization in theories of gravitation. Instabilities can be beneficial since their growth often leads to prominent observable signatures which makes them especially relevant to relatively low…
It has long been understood that certain theories of ghost free massive gravity and their multi-graviton extensions can be thought of as arising from a higher dimensional theory of gravity, upon discretising the extra dimension. However,…
This contribution reviews scalar-tensor theories whose Lagrangian contains second-order derivatives of a scalar field but nevertheless propagate only one scalar mode (in addition to the usual two tensor modes), and are thus not plagued with…
I discuss the issue of degrees of freedom in modified teleparallel gravity. These theories do have an extra structure on top of the usual (pseudo)Riemannian manifold, that of a flat parallel transport. This structure is absolutely abstract…
Most existing theories of dark energy and/or modified gravity, involving a scalar degree of freedom, can be conveniently described within the framework of the Effective Theory of Dark Energy, based on the unitary gauge where the scalar…
We investigate a class of gravity theories respecting only spatial covariance, termed spatially covariant gravity, in the presence of an auxiliary scalar field. We examine the conditions on the Lagrangian required to eliminate scalar…
We find a connection between relativistic Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) theories and (scalar) mimetic gravity. We first demonstrate that any relativistic MOND model featuring a unit-timelike vector field, such as TeVeS or…
We investigate the ghostfree scalar-tensor theory with a timelike scalar field, with derivatives of the scalar field up to the third order and with the Riemann tensor up to the quadratic order. We build two types of linear spaces. One is…
Minimally modified gravity theories are modifications of general relativity with two local gravitational degrees of freedom in four dimensions. Their construction relies on the breaking of 4D diffeomorphism invariance keeping however the…
We investigate a large class of gravity theories that respect spatial covariance, and involve kinetic terms for both the spatial metric and the lapse function. Generally such kind of theories propagate four degrees of freedom, one of which…
We consider scalar-tensor theories of gravity in an accelerating universe. The equations for the background evolution and the perturbations are given in full generality for any parametrization of the Lagrangian, and we stress that apparent…
We study new consistent scalar-tensor theories of gravity recently introduced by Langlois and Noui with potentially interesting cosmological applications. We derive the conditions for the existence of a primary constraint that prevents the…
We have recently proposed a new class of gravitational scalar-tensor theories free from Ostrogradski instabilities, in arXiv:1404.6495. As they generalize Horndeski theories, or "generalized" galileons, we call them G$^3$. These theories…