Material models of dark energy

Abstract

A new class of “dark energy” models is reviewed and developed, in which the relativistic theory of solids is used to construct material models of dark energy. These are models which include the effects of a continuous medium with well defined physical properties at the level of linearized perturbations. The formalism is constructed for a medium with arbitrary symmetry, and then specialised to isotropic media (which will be the case of interest for the majority of cosmological applications). The theory of relativistic isotropic viscoelastic media is developed whilst keeping in mind that we ultimately want to observationally constrain the allowed properties of the material model. This is done by obtaining the viscoelastic equations of state for perturbations (the entropy and anisotropic stress), as well as identifying the consistent corner of the theory which has constant equation of state parameter inline image. A connection to the non-relativistic theory of solids is obtained by identifying the two quadratic invariants that are needed to construct the energy-momentum tensor, namely the Rayleigh dissipation function and Lagrangian for perturbations. Finally, the notion is developed that the viscoelastic behavior of the medium can be thought of as a non-minimally coupled massive gravity theory. This also provides a tool-kit for constructing consistent generalizations of coupled dark energy theories.