Conformal analogs of the Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory. I.

Recent cosmological observations of large-scale structures (red shift of type Ia supernovae) confirm that the universe is currently expanding at an accelerating rate and its dominant component is dark energy. This has stimulated the development of the theory of gravity and led to many alternative variants, including tensor-scalar ones. This paper deals with the role of conformal transformations in the Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory. Variants of intrinsic, conformally coupled, and Einstein representations are examined. In the Einstein representation an exact analytic solution for the standard cosmological model is obtained. It is expressed in terms of the relative energy contributions of ordinary matter Ω _m , the scalar field Ω _CK , and a term Ω_Λ related to the cosmological constant Λ . Information on the evolution of the universe for the case with a minimally coupled scalar field is given in the form of graphs.