Dark matter via massive bigravity

Luc Blanchet (1) , Lavinia Heisenberg

1 IAP - Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris

In this work we investigate the existence of relativistic models for dark matter in the context of bimetric gravity, used here to reproduce the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at galactic scales. For this purpose we consider two different species of dark matter particles that separately couple to the two metrics of bigravity. These two sectors are linked together via an internal U (1 ) vector field, and some effective composite metric built out of the two metrics. Among possible models only certain classes of kinetic and interaction terms are allowed without invoking ghost degrees of freedom. Along these lines we explore the number of allowed kinetic terms in the theory and point out the presence of ghosts in a previous model. Finally, we propose a promising class of ghost-free candidate theories that could provide the MOND phenomenology at galactic scales while reproducing the standard cold dark matter model at cosmological scales.

Keywords: 95.35.+d; 04.50.Kd; Dark matter; Modified theories of gravity; General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology; Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics; High Energy Physics - Theory

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]

Luc Blanchet, Lavinia Heisenberg. Dark matter via massive bigravity. Physical Review D, 2015, 91, ⟨10.1103/PhysRevD.91.103518⟩. ⟨insu-03644946⟩