Cosmology in nonlocal gravity

Abstract

In this chapter we review the recent developments of realizing $R^2$-like inflation in the framework of a most general UV nonlocal extension of Einstein's general theory of relativity (GR). It is a well-motivated robust approach towards quantum gravity. In the past decades, nonlocal gravitational theories which are quadratic in curvature have been understood to be ghost-free and super-renormalizable around maximally symmetric spacetimes. However, in the context of early Universe cosmology we show that one must go beyond the quadratic curvature nonlocal gravity in order to achieve a consistent ghost-free framework of Universe evolution from quasi de Sitter to Minkowski spacetime. In this regard, we discuss a construction of a most general nonlocal gravity action that leads to $R^2$-like inflation and discuss the corresponding observational predictions for the scalar and tensor spectral tilts, tensor-to-scalar ratio, and the primordial non-Gaussianities. We present an analysis of how the nonlocal inflationary cosmology goes beyond the established notions of effective field theories of inflation. Finally, we comment on some open questions and prospects of higher curvature nonlocal gravity on its way of achieving the UV completion.

31 pages, 4 figures, Invited chapter of the Handbook of Quantum Gravity, C. Bambi, L. Modesto and I.L. Shapiro (Eds.), Springer, expected in 2023

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dirac-Bergmann analysis and Degrees of Freedom of Coincident $f(Q)$-gravity
• Finding origins of CMB anomalies in the inflationary quantum fluctuations
• Amplitude prescriptions in field theories with complex poles
• Classicized dynamics and initial conditions in field theories with fakeons
• Cosmic inflation in non-perturbative quantum gravity
• Cosmology of fractional gravity