Related papers: Collective scalarization or tachyonization: when a…
We present unified ways of handling the cosmological perturbations in a class of gravity theory covered by a general action in eq. (1). This gravity includes our previous generalized $f(\phi,R)$ gravity and the gravity theory motivated by…
The cosmological effects of the tachyon rolling down to its ground state are discussed by coupling a simple effective field theory for the tachyon field to Einstein gravity. As the tachyon rolls down to the minimum of its potential the…
Structure occurs over a vast range of scales in the universe. Our large-scale cosmological models are coarse-grained representations of what exists, which have much less structure than there really is. An important problem for cosmology is…
We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the effect of screened modified gravity models on the mass estimates of galaxy clusters. In particular, we focus on two novel aspects: (i) we study modified gravity models in which…
The results of the renormalization group are commonly advertised as the existence of power law singularities near critical points. The classic predictions are often violated and logarithmic and exponential corrections are treated on a…
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…
This article looks at how inhomogeneous spacetime models may be significant for cosmology. First it looks at how the averaging process may affect large scale dynamics, with backreaction effects leading to effective contributions to the…
The equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses is a defining feature of general relativity. Here, we clarify the status of the equivalence principle for interactions mediated by a universally coupled scalar, motivated partly by recent…
In the minimal formulation of gravity with Lifshitz-type anisotropic scaling, the gauge symmetries of the system are foliation-preserving diffeomorphisms of spacetime. Consequently, compared to general relativity, the spectrum contains an…
We study the gravitational collapse of an overdensity of nonrelativistic matter under the action of gravity and a chameleon scalar field. We show that the spherical collapse model is modified by the presence of a chameleon field. In…
We discuss the Damour--Esposito-Far\`ese model of gravity, which predicts the spontaneous scalarization of neutron stars in a certain range of parameter space. In the cosmological setup, the scalar field responsible for scalarization is…
The macroscopic properties of compact stars in modified gravity theories can be significantly different from the general relativistic (GR) predictions. Within the gravitational context of scalar-tensor theories, with a scalar field $\phi$…
It is widely believed that the global baryon content and mass-to-light ratio of groups and clusters of galaxies are a fair representative of the matter mix of the universe and therefore, can be used to reliably determine the cosmic mass…
We consider warped compactifications in (4+d)-dimensional theories, with four dimensional de Sitter dS_4 vacua (with Hubble parameter H) and with a compact internal space. After introducing a gauge-invariant formalism for the generic metric…
Critical collapse in tensor-multi-scalar gravity theories is studied, and found that for any given target space all the theories conformally related belong to the same universal class. When only one scalar field is present, the universality…
We argue that topological compactons (solitons with compact support) may be quite common objects if $k$-fields, i.e., fields with nonstandard kinetic term, are considered, by showing that even for models with well-behaved potentials the…
Recently, two simple criteria were proposed to assess if vacua emerging from an effective scalar field theory are part of the string "landscape" or "swampland". The former are the vacua that emerge from string compactifications; the latter…
Primordial scalar perturbations may be generated when complex conformal scalar field rolls down its negative quartic potential. We begin with the discussion of peculiar infrared properties of this scenario. We then consider the statistical…
In a Riemannian manifold, it is well known that the scalar curvature at a point can be recovered from the volumes (areas) of small geodesic balls (spheres). We show the scalar curvature is likewise determined by the relative capacities of…
Forthcoming large galaxy cluster surveys will yield tight constraints on cosmological models. It has been shown that in an idealized survey, containing > 10,000 clusters, statistical errors on dark energy and other cosmological parameters…