http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05679
A unified model independent effective description of cosmological perturbations is derived in terms of two effective quantities, playing the role of effective propagation speeds of curvature perturbations and gravitational waves, encoding the effects of the interaction of perturbations at any order, and inducing a modification of the friction term of the perturbations propagation equation. The approach can be applied to dark energy, modified gravity, dark matter, for fields of arbitrary number and spin, and is particularly suitable for model independent analysis of observational data. The structure of the effective actions and equations is the same for scalar and tensor perturbations.
The effective actions can be written as the Klein-Gordon action in terms of an appropriately defined effective metric, dependent on the effective speed. In this geometrical interpretation, the effective metric emerges as the result of the interaction and self-interaction of perturbations, hinting to possible connections with emergent gravity.
As an example of an application we find that the effective speeds of curvature perturbations and gravitational waves can be frequency and polarization dependent even for a minimally coupled scalar field in general relativity, when higher order terms effects are computed, going beyond the quadratic action, or in axion inflation. We discuss the relation between the effective speed and quantum correlators.
A. Romano
Wed, 18 Jan 23
73/133
Comments: N/A