Beyond Einstein’s General Relativity: Hybrid metric-Palatini gravity and curvature-matter couplings (original) (raw)

2020, International Journal of Modern Physics D

Einstein’s General Relativity (GR) is possibly one of the greatest intellectual achievements ever conceived by the human mind. In fact, over the last century, GR has proven to be an extremely successful theory, with a well established experimental footing, at least for weak gravitational fields. Its predictions range from the existence of black holes and gravitational radiation (now confirmed) to the cosmological models. Indeed, a central theme in modern Cosmology is the perplexing fact that the Universe is undergoing an accelerating expansion, which represents a new imbalance in the governing gravitational equations. The cause of the late-time cosmic acceleration remains an open and tantalizing question, and has forced theorists and experimentalists to question whether GR is the correct relativistic theory of gravitation. This has spurred much research in modified theories of gravity, where extensions of the Hilbert–Einstein action describe the gravitational field, in particular, [...