Tripotential MOND theories

Abstract

I present a new class of nonrelativistic, modified-gravity MOND theories. The three gravitational degrees of freedom of these ``TRIMOND'' theories are the MOND potential and two auxiliary potentials, one of which emerges as the Newtonian potential. Their Lagrangians involve a function of three acceleration variables -- the gradients of the potentials. So, the transition from the Newtonian to the MOND regime is rather richer than in the aquadratic-Lagrangian theory (AQUAL) and the quasilinear MOND theory (QUMOND), which are special cases of TRIMOND, each defined by a Lagrangian function of a single variable. In particular, unlike AQUAL and QUMOND whose deep-MOND limit (DML) is fully dictated by the required scale invariance, here, the scale-invariant DML still requires specifying a function of two variables. For one-dimensional (e.g., spherical) mass distributions, in all TRIMOND theories the MOND acceleration is a (theory specific, but system independent) function of the Newtonian acceleration; their variety appears in nonsymmetric situations. Also, they all make the salient, primary MOND predictions. For example, they predict the same DML virial relation as AQUAL and QUMOND, and thus the same DML $M-σ$ relation, and the same DML two-body force. Yet they can differ materially on secondary predictions. Such TRIMOND theories may be the nonrelativistic limits of scalar-bimetric relativistic formulations of MOND, such as BIMOND with an added scalar.