Geodesic Congruences and a Collapsing Stellar Distribution in f (T ) Theories

Understand

Teleparallel Gravity (TG) describes gravitation as a torsional- rather than curvature-based effect.

• As in curvature-based constructions of gravity, several different formulations can be proposed, one of which is the Teleparallel equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR) which is dynamically equivalent to GR.
• In this work, we explore the evolution of a spatially homogeneous collapsing stellar body in the context of two important modifications to TEGR, namely f (T) gravity which is the TG analogue of f (R) gravity, and a nonminimal coupling with a scalar field which has become popular in TG for its effects in cosmology.
• We explore the role of geodesic deviation to study the congruence of nearby particles in lieu of the Raychaudhuri equation.