Title

A Unified Approach to Cosmic Acceleration

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Scott Watson, Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Minjoon Park, Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, Ann Arbor, MI
Kathryn M. Zurek, Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, Ann Arbor, MI

Document Type

Article

Date

3-23-2010

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/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 multi-field case for perturbatively constructed backgrounds.

Additional Information

33 pages, 1 fig., references added, improved comments regarding the connection with non-perturbatively constructed backgrounds. More informaton at http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.1722

Recommended Citation

Watson, Scott; Park, Minjoon; and Zurek, Kathryn M., "A Unified Approach to Cosmic Acceleration" (2010). Physics - All Scholarship. 399.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/399

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org