Generalized disformal Horndeski theories: Cosmological perturbations and consistent matter coupling

Abstract Invertible disformal transformations are a useful tool to investigate ghost-free scalar–tensor theories. By performing a higher-derivative generalization of the invertible disformal transformation on Horndeski theories, we construct a novel class of ghost-free scalar–tensor theories, which we dub generalized disformal Horndeski theories. Specifically, these theories lie beyond the quadratic/cubic DHOST class. We explore cosmological perturbations to identify a subclass where gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light and clarify the conditions for the absence of ghost/gradient instabilities for tensor and scalar perturbations. We also investigate the conditions under which a matter field can be consistently coupled to these theories without introducing unwanted extra degrees of freedom.