Effective field theory of dark energy: A review

Abstract

The discovery of cosmic acceleration has triggered a consistent body of theoretical work aimed at modeling its phenomenology and understanding its fundamental physical nature. In recent years, a powerful formalism that accomplishes both these goals has been developed, the so-called effective field theory of dark energy. It can capture the behavior of a wide class of modified gravity theories and classify them according to the imprints they leave on the smooth background expansion history of the Universe and on the evolution of linear perturbations. The effective field theory of dark energy is based on a Lagrangian description of cosmological perturbations which depends on a number of functions of time, some of which are non-minimal couplings representing genuine deviations from General Relativity. Such a formalism is thus particularly convenient to fit and interpret the wealth of new data that will be provided by future galaxy surveys. Despite its recent appearance, this formalism has already allowed a systematic investigation of what lies beyond the General Relativity landscape and provided a conspicuous amount of theoretical predictions and observational results. In this review, we report on these achievements.