We present a unified framework for the study of late time cosmic acceleration. Using methods of effective field theory, we show that existing proposals for late time acceleration can be subsumed in a single framework, rather than many compartmentalized theories. We construct the most general action consistent with symmetry principles, derive the background and perturbation evolution equations, and demonstrate that for special choices of our parameters we can reproduce results already existing in the literature. Lastly, we lay the foundation for future work placing phenomenological constraints on the parameters of the effective theory. Although in this paper we focus on late time acceleration, our construction also generalizes the effective field theory of inflation to the scalar-tensor and multifield case for perturbatively constructed backgrounds.

• Received 23 March 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.81.124008