Inverse problem: Reconstruction of modified gravity action in Palatini formalism by Supernova Type Ia data

TL;DR

This paper develops an inverse method to reconstruct the $f(R)$ gravity action from supernova data, demonstrating the data requirements and proposing diagnostics to differentiate models of cosmic acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inverse approach to derive $f(R)$ gravity actions from observational expansion history data, including a viability analysis with synthetic data.

Findings

More than 1500 SNIa data points are needed for accurate reconstruction.

The method can distinguish between $ ext{Lambda}$CDM and alternative gravity models.

A new diagnostic tool is proposed for model differentiation.

Abstract

We introduce in $f(R)$ gravity--Palatini formalism the method of inverse problem to extract the action from the expansion history of the universe. First, we use an ansatz for the scale factor and apply the inverse method to derive an appropriate action for the gravity. In the second step we use the Supernova Type Ia data set from the Union sample and obtain a smoothed function for the Hubble parameter up to the redshift~1.7. We apply the smoothed Hubble parameter in the inverse approach and reconstruct the corresponding action in $f(R)$ gravity. In the next step we investigate the viability of reconstruction method, doing a Monte-Carlo simulation we generate synthetic SNIa data with the quality of union sample and show that roughly more than 1500 SNIa data is essential to reconstruct correct action. Finally with the enough SNIa data, we propose two diagnosis in order to distinguish between the $\Lambda$CDM model and an alternative theory for the acceleration of the universe.