On the recently proposed mimetic Dark Matter

Recently, an interesting gravitational model was proposed in order to mimic the effect of Dark Matter. Chamseddine and Mukhanov in the arXiv preprint 1308.5410 have separated the conformal mode of a physical metric in the form of a squared gradient of an auxiliary scalar field. Notably, the variational principle has given a more general equation of motion than that of purely Einsteinian relativity theory, with a possibility of reproducing an effective Dark Matter. In this short Letter, we explain the nature of this phenomenon in terms of the class of functions on which the variation takes place. Then we give a more transparent equivalent formulation of the model without an auxiliary metric. Finally, we speculate a bit about possible extensions. (C) 2013 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.