Diffusion in unimodular gravity: Analytical solutions, late-time acceleration, and cosmological constraints

Unimodular gravity is an appealing approach to address the cosmological constant problem. In this scenario, the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate and the cosmological constant appears merely as an integration constant. Recently, it has been shown that energy diffusion that may arise in quantum gravity and in theories with spontaneous collapse is compatible with this framework by virtue of its restricted diffeomorphism invariance. New studies suggest that this phenomenon could lead to higher-order equations in the context of homogeneous and isotropic Universe, affecting the well-posedness of their Cauchy initial-value problem. In this work, we show that this issue can be circumvented by assuming an equation of state that relates the energy density to the function that characterizes the diffusion. As an application, we solve the field equations analytically for an isotropic and homogeneous Universes in a barotropic model and in the mass-proportional continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) scenario, assuming that only dark matter develops energy diffusion. Different solutions possessing phase transition from decelerated to accelerated expansion are found. We use cosmological data of type Ia Supernovae and observational Hubble data to constrain the free parameters of both models. It is found that very small but nontrivial energy nonconservation is compatible with the barotropic model. However, for the CSL model, we find that the best-fit values are not compatible with previous laboratory experiments. We comment on this fact and propose future directions to explore energy diffusion in cosmology.