The accelerating Universe and a limiting curvature proposal

Abstract

Abstract. We consider the hypothesis of a limiting minimal curvature in gravity as a way to construct a class of theories exhibiting late-time cosmic acceleration. Guided by the minimal curvature conjecture (MCC) we are naturally lead to a set of scalar tensor theories in which the scalar is non-minimally coupled to the matter Lagrangian. The model is compared to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter concordance model and to the observational data using the “gold ” SNeIa sample of Riess et. al. (2004). We present a toy model designed to demonstrate the possibility that such a new, possibly fundamental, principle may be responsible for the recent period of cosmological acceleration. PACS numbers: 98.80.-k, 04.50.+h, 95.36.+x arXiv: astro-ph/0608034The Accelerating Universe and a Limiting Curvature Proposal 2