The Effective Fluid Approach for Modified Gravity and Its Applications

Abstract

In this review, we briefly summarize the so-called effective fluid approach, which is a compact framework that can be used to describe a plethora of different modified gravity models as general relativity (GR) and a dark energy (DE) fluid. This approach, which is complementary to the cosmological effective field theory, has several benefits, as it allows for the easier inclusion of most modified gravity models into the state-of-the-art Boltzmann codes that are typically hard-coded for GR and DE. Furthermore, it can also provide theoretical insights into their behavior since in linear perturbation theory it is easy to derive physically motivated quantities such as the DE anisotropic stress or the DE sound speed. We also present some explicit applications of the effective fluid approach with f(R), Horndeski and scalar–vector–tensor models, namely, how this approach can be used to easily solve the perturbation equations and incorporate the aforementioned modified gravity models into Boltzmann codes so as to obtain cosmological constraints using Monte Carlo analyses.