Related papers: Recent Developments in Degenerate Higher Order Sca…
The deflection of light in the strong field limit is an important test for alternative theories of gravity. However, solutions for the metric that allow for analytic computations are not always available. We implement a hybrid…
Scalar-tensor theories (STTs) are a widely studied alternative to General Relativity (GR) in which gravity is endowed with an additional scalar degree of freedom. Although severely constrained by solar system and pulsar timing experiments,…
We perform a Hamiltonian analysis and prove that a large class of scalar-tensor theories whose Lagrangian is given by a generic function $F\left(K_{ab},N,R_{ab},h^{ab},\nabla_a,t\right)$ is free from the Ostrogradsky ghost, and thus these…
We investigate the late-time cosmological behaviour of scalar-tensor theories with a universal multiplicative coupling between the scalar field and the matter Lagrangian in the matter era. This class of theory encompasses the case of the…
We study new classes of metric transformations in the context of scalar-tensor theories, which involve both higher derivatives of the scalar field and derivatives of the metric itself. In general, such transformations are not invertible as…
It is known that any nondegenerate Lagrangian containing time derivative terms higher than first order suffers from the Ostrogradsky instability, pathological excitation of positive and negative energy degrees of freedom. We show that,…
The Ostrogradsky theorem implies that higher-derivative terms of a single mechanical variable are either trivial or lead to additional, ghost-like degrees of freedom. In this letter we systematically investigate how the introduction of…
The alternative version of Hamiltonian formalism for higher-derivative theories is proposed. As compared with the standard Ostrogradski approach it has the following advantages: (i) the Lagrangian, when expressed in terms of new variables…
The galilean genesis scenario is an alternative to inflation in which the universe starts expanding from Minkowski in the asymptotic past by violating the null energy condition stably. Several concrete models of galilean genesis have been…
We study Parity Violating Gravity Theories whose gravitational Lagrangian is a generic function of the scalar curvature and the parity odd curvature pseudoscalar, commonly known as the Holst (or Hojmann) term. Generalizing some previous…
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 the Horndeski's most general scalar-tensor theories, we derive the three-point correlation function of scalar non-Gaussianities generated during single-field inflation in the presence of slow-variation corrections to the leading-order…
In the context of Horndeski cosmologies, we consider a dynamical adjustment mechanism able to screen any value of the vacuum energy of the matter fields leading to a fixed de Sitter geometry. Thus, we present the most general scalar-tensor…
We study static spherically symmetric black hole solutions with a linearly time-dependent scalar field and discuss their linear stability in the shift- and reflection-symmetric subclass of quadratic degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor…
We study the role of field redefinitions in general scalar-tensor theories. In particular, we first focus on the class of field redefinitions linear in the spin-2 field and involving derivatives of the spin-0 mode, generically known as…
A higher order theory of dilaton gravity is constructed as a generalization of the Einstein-Lovelock theory of pure gravity. Its Lagrangian contains terms with higher powers of the Riemann tensor and of the first two derivatives of the…
We study a general scalar field Lagrangian coupled with matter and linear in $\Box\phi$ (also called KGB model). Within this class of models, we find the most general form of the Lagrangian that allows for cosmological scaling solutions,…
An extension of the Starobinsky model is proposed. Besides the usual Starobinsky Lagrangian, a term proportional to the derivative of the scalar curvature, $\nabla_{\mu}R\nabla^{\mu}R$, is considered. The analyzis is done in the Einstein…
Future observations of the large-scale structure have the potential to investigate cosmological models with a high degree of complexity, including the properties of gravity on large scales, the presence of a complicated dark energy…
We propose an algebraic analysis using a 3+1 decomposition to identify conditions for a clever cancellation of the higher derivatives, which plagued the theory with Ostrogradsky ghosts, by exploiting some existing degeneracy in the…