Probing Newton's Constant on Vast Scales: DGP Gravity, Cosmic Acceleration and Large Scale Structure

Abstract

The nature of the fuel that drives today's cosmic acceleration is an open and tantalizing mystery. The braneworld theory of Dvali, Gabadadze, and Porrati (DGP) provides a context where late-time acceleration is driven not by some energy-momentum component (dark energy), but rather is the manifestation of the excruciatingly slow leakage of gravity off our four-dimensional world into an extra dimension. At the same time, DGP gravity alters the gravitational force law in a specific and dramatic way at cosmologically accessible scales. We derive the DGP gravitational force law in a cosmological setting for spherical perturbations at subhorizon scales and compute the growth of large-scale structure. We find that a residual repulsive force at large distances gives rise to a suppression of the growth of density and velocity perturbations. Explaining the cosmic acceleration in this framework leads to a present day fluctuation power spectrum normalization sigma_8 <= 0.8 at about the two-sigma level, in contrast with observations. We discuss further theoretical work necessary to go beyond our approximations to confirm these results.