Using cosmological perturbation theory to distinguish between General Relativity and Unimodular Gravity

Abstract

Unimodular Gravity is one of the oldest geometric gravity theory alternative to General Relativity. Essentially, it is based on the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian with an additional constraint on the determinant of the metric. It can be explicitly shown that Unimodular Gravity can be recast as General Relativity in presence of a cosmological constant. This fact has led to many discussions on the equivalence of both theories at classical and quantum levels. Here we present an analysis focused on the classical scalar perturbations around a cosmological background. The discussion is extended for the case where a non-minimal coupled scalar field is introduced. Our results indicate that the equivalence is not verified completely at perturbative level.