Observational Constraints on Visser's Cosmological Model

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Visser's massive graviton theory against cosmological observations, finding it can explain acceleration without dark energy but is less favored than the standard Lambda-CDM model.

Contribution

It assesses the viability of Visser's massive graviton theory using multiple cosmological datasets, providing constraints and comparison with Lambda-CDM.

Findings

Visser's theory can produce accelerated expansion without dark energy.

Combined data disfavor Visser's model compared to Lambda-CDM.

The model fits supernova data but struggles with BAO and CMB constraints.

Abstract

Theories of gravity for which gravitons can be treated as massive particles have presently been studied as realistic modifications of General Relativity, and can be tested with cosmological observations. In this work, we study the ability of a recently proposed theory with massive gravitons, the so-called Visser theory, to explain the measurements of luminosity distance from the Union2 compilation, the most recent Type-Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) dataset, adopting the current ratio of the total density of non-relativistic matter to the critical density ($\Omega_m$) as a free parameter. We also combine the SNe Ia data with constraints from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and CMB measurements. We find that, for the allowed interval of values for $\Omega_m$, a model based on Visser's theory can produce an accelerated expansion period without any dark energy component, but the combined analysis (SNe Ia + BAO + CMB) shows that the model is disfavored when compared with $\Lambda$CDM model.