Cosmological perturbations in the spatially covariant gravity with a dynamical lapse function

TL;DR

This paper studies scalar perturbations in a spatially covariant gravity theory with a dynamical lapse, revealing how heavy and light modes interact and affect the power spectrum, with implications for cosmological models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of scalar perturbations with a dynamical lapse, applying multi-field techniques and deriving effective theories for cosmological implications.

Findings

Heavy mode becomes infinitely massive when lapse is auxiliary.

Corrections to the power spectrum from heavy modes are calculated.

Large-scale coupled modes exhibit power-law behavior.

Abstract

We investigate the scalar perturbations in a class of spatially covariant gravity theory with a dynamical lapse function. Generally, there are two scalar degrees of freedom due to the presence of the velocity of the lapse function. We treat the scalar perturbations as analogues of those in a two-field inflationary mode, in which one is light mode and the other is the heavy mode. This is justified by the fact that the scalar mode due to the dynamical lapse function becomes infinitely heavy in the limit when the lapse function reduces to be an auxiliary variable. The standard approaches of multiple filed perturbations can be applied to deal with our model. By integrating out the heavy mode and derive the effective theory for the single light field, we find the solution to the single mode in the form of plane waves. Then we calculate the corrections to the power spectrum of the light mode from the heavy mode, by making use of the standard perturbative method of field theory. At last, when the two fields are not weakly coupled, we find a power law mode for the coupled system in large scales.