Cosmology Beyond Einstein

TL;DR

This thesis explores modifications to general relativity, including massive and bimetric gravity theories and Lorentz violation during inflation, to address the universe's accelerated expansion and test gravity on cosmological scales.

Contribution

It introduces new methods for analyzing cosmological perturbations in massive and bimetric gravity and investigates Lorentz violation effects during inflation, providing novel theoretical insights.

Findings

Stable bimetric models can be tested against structure formation data

Certain vector-scalar couplings during inflation are severely constrained by instabilities

Massive gravity theories offer a potential explanation for late-time cosmic acceleration

Abstract

The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because gravitation dominates the other forces mostly on large scales, cosmological probes provide an ideal testing ground for theories of gravity. In this thesis, we describe two complementary approaches to the problem of testing gravity using cosmology. In the first part, we discuss the cosmological solutions of massive gravity and its generalisation to a bimetric theory. These theories describe a graviton with a small mass, and can potentially explain the late-time acceleration in a technically-natural way. We describe these self-accelerating solutions and investigate the cosmological perturbations in depth, beginning with an investigation of their linear stability, followed by the construction of a method for solving these perturbations in the quasistatic limit. This allows the predictions of stable bimetric models to be compared to observations of structure formation. Next, we discuss prospects for theories in which matter "doubly couples" to both metrics, and examine the cosmological expansion history in both massive gravity and bigravity with a specific double coupling which is ghost-free at low energies. In the second and final part, we study the consequences of Lorentz violation during inflation. We consider Einstein-aether theory, in which a vector field spontaneously breaks Lorentz symmetry and couples nonminimally to the metric, and allow the vector to couple in a general way to a scalar field. Specialising to inflation, we discuss the slow-roll solutions in background and at the perturbative level. The system exhibits a severe instability which places constraints on such a vector-scalar coupling to be at least five orders of magnitude stronger [...]