Cosmological backreaction in higher-derivative gravity expansions

Abstract: We calculate a general effective stress-energy tensor induced by cosmological inhomogeneity in effective theories of gravity where the action is Taylor-expandable in the Riemann tensor and covariant derivatives of the Riemann tensor. This is of interest as an effective fluid that might provide an alternative to the cosmological constant, but it also applies to gravitational waves. We use an adaptation of Green and Wald's weak-averaging framework, which averages over perturbations in the field equation where the perturbation length scales are small compared to the averaging scale. In this adaptation, the length scale of the effective theory, $1/M$, is also taken to be small compared with the averaging scale. This ensures that the perturbation length scales remain in fixed proportion to the length scale of the effective theory as the cosmological averaging scale is taken to be large. We find that backreaction from higher-derivative terms in the effective action can continue to be important in the late universe, given a source of sufficiently high-frequency metric perturbations. This backreaction might also provide a window on exotic particle physics in the far ultraviolet.