arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M. Amarzguioui.
Recently, there has been suggestions that the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe is due not to a cosmological constant, but rather to inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter. In this work, we investigate a specific class of inhomogeneous models that can be solved analytically, namely the dust-dominated Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi universe models. We show that they do not permit accelerated cosmic expansion.
We investigate f(R) theories of gravity within the Palatini approach and show how one can determine the expansion history, H(a), for an arbitrary choice of f(R). As an example, we consider cosmological constraints on such theories arising from the supernova type Ia, large scale structure formation and cosmic microwave background observations. We find that best fit to the data is a non-null leading order correction to the Einstein gravity, but the current data exhibits no significant preference over the concordance LCDM model. Our results show that the often considered 1/R models are not compatible with the data. The results demonstrate that the background expansion alone can act as a good discriminator between modified gravity models when multiple data sets are used.