Unmodified Gravity

Abstract

By relaxing the conventional assumption of a purely gravitational interaction between dark energy and dark matter, substantial alterations to the growth of cosmological structure can occur. In this work we focus on the homogeneous transfer of energy from a decaying form of dark energy. We present simple analytic solutions to the modified growth rates of matter fluctuations in these models, and demonstrate that neglecting physics within the dark sector may induce a significant bias in the inferred growth rate, potentially offering a false signature of modified gravity.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, new eq (7), changes reflect published versio