SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 1904.07321

A local Lagrangian for MOND as modified inertia

Abstract

We propose a local Lagrangian for a point particle where its inertia part is modified in the regime of small accelerations. For the standard gravitational central force, it recovers the deep MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) (accelerations $\ll a_0\approx 10^{-10}$m/s$^{2}$) equations of motion in the case of a circular orbit. Perturbations to that turn on higher derivative terms, leading to exponentially unstable solutions that must vanish in order to account for the very small scattering of the Tully-Fisher relation. Unstable solutions linearly growing with time remain valid for a characteristic timescale of at least 3 billion years. We show that vertical perturbations recover similar results to dark matter for old galaxies, but deviations could be present for young ones. We also present ways to probe our approach and describe some of its subtleties, such as the strong equivalence principle (violated in general), the center of mass motion of a composite body, and how in some cases it could overcome Ostrogradsky's instabilities (with naturally occurring piecewise Lagrangians). Our main conclusions regarding our MOND-like proposal are: (i) it constitutes a possible recipe where Ostrogradsky instabilities could be "tamed"; (ii) it is a falsifiable approach in various contexts and (iii) it might explain simultaneously some of the issues usual modified gravity MOND and dark matter phenomenologies have difficulties individually. These aspects seem relevant to start addressing practical ways to differentiate modified gravity MOND from modified inertia and give insights into alternative ways to tackle some astrophysical and cosmological puzzles.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Renato Costa, Guilherme Franzmann, Jonas P. Pereira. 2019-04-15. A local Lagrangian for MOND as modified inertia. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07321

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc