Logo image
Back
Dark energy from dynamical projective connections
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Dark energy from dynamical projective connections

Samuel Brensinger, Kenneth Heitritter, Vincent G J Rodgers, Kory Stiffler and Catherine A Whiting
Classical and quantum gravity, Vol.37(5), p.55003
03/05/2020
DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/ab685d
url
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05334View
Open Access

Abstract

We further develop the gravitational model, Thomas-Whitehead gravity (TW Gravity), that arises when projective connections become dynamical fields. TW Gravity has its origins in geometric actions from string theory where the TW projective connection appears as a rank two tensor, , on the spacetime manifold. Using a Gauss-Bonnet (GB) action built from the -dimensional TW connection, and applying the tensor decomposition , we arrive at a gravitational model made up of a -dimensional Einstein-Hilbert  +  GB action sourced by Dab and with cosmological constant . The action is studied and we find that , with J0 the coupling constant for Dab. For equal to the current measured value, J0 is on the order of the measured angular momentum of the observable Universe. We view this as controlling the scale of patches of the Universe that acquire angular momentum, with the net angular momentum of multiple patches vanishing, as required by the cosmological principle. We further find a universal axial scalar coupling to all fermions where the trace, acts as the scalar. This suggests that is also a dark matter portal for non-standard model fermions.
 dark energy modified gravity projective connections projective transformations

Details

Metrics

2 Record Views
9 Times Cited - Web of Science
Logo image