Accelerated expansion as manifestation of gravity: when Dark Energy belongs to the left
Name: LEONARDO GIANI
Type: PhD thesis
Publication date: 23/10/2020
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| OLIVER FABIO PIATTELLA | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| HERMANO ENDLICH SCHNEIDER VELTEN | Internal Examiner * |
| JÚLIO CÉSAR FABRIS | Internal Examiner * |
| OLIVER FABIO PIATTELLA | Advisor * |
Summary: In order to explain the Late-times accelerated expansion of the Universe we must ap- peal to some form of Dark Energy. In the standard model of cosmology, the latter is interpreted as a Cosmological Constant Λ. However, for a number of reasons, a Cos- mological Constant is not completely satisfactory. In this thesis we study Dark Energy models of geometrical nature, and thus a manifestation of the underlying gravitational theory. In the first part of the thesis we will review the ΛCDM model and give a brief classification of the landscape of alternative Dark Energy candidates based on the Love- lock theorem. The second part of the thesis is instead devoted to the presentation of our main results on the topic of Dark Energy. To begin with, we will report our studies about nonlocal modifications of gravity involving the differential operator 􏰪^(−1)R, with emphasis on a specific model and on the common behavior shared by this and similar theories in the late stages of the evolution of the Universe. Then we introduce a novel class of modified gravity theories based on the anticurvature tensor Aμν (the inverse of the Ricci tensor), and assess their capability as source of Dark Energy. Finally, we will discuss a type of drift effects which we predicted in the contest of Strong Gravitational Lensing, which could be employed both to study the effective equation of state of the Universe and to constrain violations of the Equivalence Principle.
