F(R) gravity in the early Universe: Electroweak phase transition and chameleon mechanism

Abstract

© 2019 Chinese Physical Society and the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and IOP Publishing Ltd.It is widely believed that the screening mechanism is an essential feature for the modified gravity theory. Although this mechanism has been examined thoroughly in the past decade, their analyses are based on a conventional fluid prescription for the matter-sector configuration. In this paper, we demonstrate a new formulation of the chameleon mechanism in F(R) gravity theory, to shed light on quantum-field theoretical effects on the chameleon mechanism as well as the related scalaron physics, induced by the matter sector. We show a possibility that the chameleon mechanism is absent in the early Universe based on a scale-invariant-extended scenario beyond the standard model of particle physics, in which a realistic electroweak phase transition, yielding the right amount of baryon asymmetry of Universe today, simultaneously breaks the scale invariance in the early Universe. We also briefly discuss the oscillation of the scalaron field and indirect generation of non-tensorial gravitational waves induced by the electroweak phase transition