Unified description of cosmological and static solutions in affine generalized theories of gravity: vecton - scalaron duality and its applications

Abstract

We briefly describe the simplest class of affine theories of gravity in multidimensional space-times with symmetric connections and their reductions to two-dimensional dilaton - vecton gravity field theories (DVG). The distinctive feature of these theories is the presence of an absolutely neutral massive (or tachyonic) vector field (vecton) with essentially nonlinear coupling to the dilaton gravity (DG). We show that in DVG the vecton field can be consistently replaced by an effectively massive scalar field (scalaron) with an unusual coupling to dilaton gravity. With this vecton - scalaron duality, one can use methods and results of the standard DG coupled to usual scalars (DGS) in more complex dilaton - scalaron gravity theories (DSG) equivalent to DVG. We present the DVG models derived by reductions of multidimensional affine theories and obtain one-dimensional dynamical systems simultaneously describing cosmological and static states in any gauge. Our approach is fully applicable to studying static and cosmological solutions in multidimensional theories as well as in general one-dimensional DGS models. We focus on global properties of the models, look for integrals and analyze the structure of the solution spaces. In integrable cases, it can be usefully visualized by drawing a `topological portrait' resembling phase portraits of dynamical systems and simply exposing global properties of static and cosmological solutions, including horizons, singularities, etc. For analytic approximations we also propose an integral equation well suited for iterations.