Nonlocal gravity with a Weyl-square term

Recent work has shown that modifications of general relativity based on the addition to the action of a nonlocal term R□-2R, or on the addition to the equations of motion of a term involving (gμν□-1R), produce dynamical models of dark energy which are cosmologically viable both at the background level and at the level of cosmological perturbations. We explore a more general class of models based on the addition to the action of terms proportional to Rμν□-2Rμν and Cμνρσ□-2Cμνρσ, where Cμνρσ is the Weyl tensor. We find that the term Rμν□-2Rμν does not give a viable background evolution. The nonlocal Weyl-square term, in contrast, does not contribute to the background evolution but we find that, at the level of cosmological perturbations, it gives instabilities in the tensor sector. Thus, only nonlocal terms which depend just on the Ricci scalar R appear to be cosmologically viable. We discuss how these results can provide a hint for the mechanism that might generate these effective nonlocal terms from a fundamental local theory.