Theory of Cosmological Perturbations with Cuscuton

Abstract

This paper presents the first derivation of the quadratic action for curvature perturbations, $\zeta$, within the framework of cuscuton gravity. We study the scalar cosmological perturbations sourced by a canonical single scalar field in the presence of cuscuton field. We identify $\zeta$ as comoving curvature with respect to the source field and we show that it retains its conservation characteristic on super horizon scales. The result provides an explicit proof that cuscuton modification of gravity around Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric is ghost free. We also investigate the potential development of other instabilities in cuscuton models. We find that in a large class of these models, there is no generic instability problem. However, depending on the details of slow-roll parameters, specific models may display gradient instabilities.