Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published June 15, 2010 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Unified approach to cosmic acceleration

Abstract

We present a unified framework for the study of late time cosmic acceleration. Using methods of effective field theory, we show that existing proposals for late time acceleration can be subsumed in a single framework, rather than many compartmentalized theories. We construct the most general action consistent with symmetry principles, derive the background and perturbation evolution equations, and demonstrate that for special choices of our parameters we can reproduce results already existing in the literature. Lastly, we lay the foundation for future work placing phenomenological constraints on the parameters of the effective theory. Although in this paper we focus on late time acceleration, our construction also generalizes the effective field theory of inflation to the scalar-tensor and multifield case for perturbatively constructed backgrounds.

Additional Information

© 2010 American Physical Society. (Received 23 March 2010; published 1 June 2010) We would like to thank L. Hui, F. Larsen, and A. Tolley for useful discussions. We would especially like to thank W. Fang and D. Huterer for useful discussions and comments on the paper. This research was supported in part by the Department of Energy and the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. S. W. would like to thank Cambridge University, DAMTP, and the Mitchell Institute at Texas A&M for hospitality.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevD.81.124008.pdf

Submitted - 1003.1722.pdf

Files

1003.1722.pdf
Files (867.8 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:7beb1c0ca32ee10bf30a7aaa3f799d9b
557.8 kB Preview Download
md5:aff12edf96a37e279c826f5ca23500de
310.0 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024