Unifying gravitational waves and dark energy

We present a unifying treatment for metric and scalar perturbations across different energy regimes in scalar-tensor theories of gravity. To do so, we introduce two connected symmetry-breaking patterns: one due to the acquisition of nontrivial vacuum expectation values by the fields and the other du...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Garoffolo, Alice, Contigiani, Omar
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 27.10.2021
Subjects
Broken symmetry
Dark energy
Frequency ranges
Geometrical optics
Gravitational waves
Mathematical analysis
Perturbation
Phenomenology
Tensors
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Summary:We present a unifying treatment for metric and scalar perturbations across different energy regimes in scalar-tensor theories of gravity. To do so, we introduce two connected symmetry-breaking patterns: one due to the acquisition of nontrivial vacuum expectation values by the fields and the other due to the distinction between background and perturbations that live on top of it. We show that the geometric optics approximation commonly used to enforce this separation is not self-consistent for high-frequency perturbations since gauge transformations mix different tensor and scalar sectors orders. We derive the equations of motions for the perturbations and describe the behavior of the solutions in the low and high-frequency limits. We conclude by describing this phenomenology in the context of two screening mechanisms, chameleon and symmetron, and show that scalar waves in every frequency range are screened, hence not detectable.
ISSN:2331-8422