TOPICAL REVIEW: Ghosts in the self-accelerating universe

The self-accelerating universe realizes the accelerated expansion of the universe at late times by large-distance modification of general relativity (GR) without a cosmological constant. The Dvali Gabadadze Porrati (DGP) braneworld model provides an explicit example of the self-accelerating universe. Recently, the DGP model became very popular for studying the observational consequences of the modified gravity models as an alternative to dark energy models in GR. However, it has been shown that the self-accelerating universe in the DGP model contains a ghost at the linearized level. The ghost carries negative energy densities and it leads to the instability of the spacetime. In this review, we review the origin of the ghost in the self-accelerating universe and explore the physical implications of the existence of the ghost.