On Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker cosmologies in non-standard gravity

The present thesis is focused on the study of FLRW cosmology in modified gravities and with scalar fields. The mystery of dark energy has made that the last decade, many efforts in theoretical physics have been focused on the explanation of the current acceleration of the Universe expansion. On the other hand, an early accelerated epoch, known as inflation, is also required in the standard cosmological model in order to fit the observational data. Here, we study the possibility to explain both effects under the same mechanism, by means of scalar fields or modified gravity. In this sense, F(R) and Gauss-Bonnet gravities are studied. This analysis is also extended to Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity, a theory that seems to be power counting renormalizable, in spite of it contains other serious problems that are also discussed in the thesis.
Comment: PhD thesis, March 2011, University of Barcelona. 176 pages. Language: English. Preface in Spanish and Catalan. 13 chapters