Nonlocal Infrared Modifications of Gravity. A Review

TL;DR

This review discusses nonlocal modifications to gravity at infrared scales, highlighting their theoretical foundations, addressing conceptual issues, and demonstrating their effectiveness in fitting cosmological data comparably to the standard Lambda-CDM model.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of nonlocal infrared gravity models, their theoretical basis, and their successful application to cosmological observations, with insights into their fundamental derivation.

Findings

Nonlocal models fit cosmological data as well as Lambda-CDM.

Nonlocal theories only emerge at the effective level, avoiding fundamental issues.

Extensions of minimal models are explored for further insights.

Abstract

We review an approach developed in the last few years by our group in which GR is modified in the infrared, at an effective level, by nonlocal terms associated to a mass scale. We begin by recalling the notion of quantum effective action and its associated nonlocalities, illustrating some of their features with the anomaly-induced effective actions in $D=2$ and $D=4$. We examine conceptual issues of nonlocal theories such as causality, degrees of freedoms and ghosts, stressing the importance of the fact that these nonlocalities only emerge at the effective level. We discuss a particular class of nonlocal theories where the nonlocal operator is associated to a mass scale, and we show that they perform very well in the comparison with cosmological observations, to the extent that they fit CMB, supernovae, BAO and structure formation data at a level fully competitive with $\Lambda$CDM, with the same number of free parameters. We explore some extensions of these `minimal' models, and we finally discuss some directions of investigation for deriving the required effective nonlocality from a fundamental local QFT.