Cosmic acceleration and growth of structure in massive gravity

Abstract

We introduce a cosmological model in the framework of Generalised Massive Gravity. This theory is an extension of non-linear massive gravity with a broken translation symmetry in the St\"uckelberg space. In a recent work, we showed the existence of cosmological solutions stable against linear perturbations. In the present paper, we build up on the previous result and study the evolution of the background solutions and the linear perturbations. At the background level, we find that the mass terms act like a fluid with time dependent equation of state $w < -1$ at late times. At linear order, we derive the Poisson's equation. We find that the scalar graviton mode invokes anisotropic stress, which brings a modification with respect to LCDM in the effective Newton's constant and the growth rate of matter perturbations. Moreover, we study the propagation of gravitational waves and find that the tensor modes acquire a time dependent mass.