We study a large family of metric-affine theories with a projective symmetry, including non-minimally coupled matter fields which respect this invariance. The symmetry is straightforwardly realised by imposing that the connection only enters through the symmetric part of the Ricci tensor, even in the matter sector. We leave the connection completely free (including torsion), and obtain its general solution as the Levi-Civita connection of an auxiliary metric, showing that the torsion only appears as a projective mode. This result justifies the widely used condition of setting vanishing torsion in these theories as a simple gauge choice. We apply our results to some particular cases considered in the literature, including the so-called Eddington-inspired-Born–Infeld theories among others. We finally discuss the possibility of imposing a gauge fixing where the connection is metric compatible, and comment on the genuine character of the non-metricity in theories where the two metrics are not conformally related.

We describe a novel procedure to map the field equations of nonlinear Ricci-based metric-affine theories of gravity, coupled to scalar matter described by a given Lagrangian, into the field equations of general relativity coupled to a different scalar field Lagrangian. Our analysis considers examples with a single and $N$ real scalar fields, described either by canonical Lagrangians or by generalized functions of the kinetic and potential terms. In particular, we consider several explicit examples involving $f(R)$ theories and the Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity model, coupled to different scalar field Lagrangians. We show how the nonlinearities of the gravitational sector of these theories can be traded to nonlinearities in the matter fields and how the procedure allows to find new solutions on both sides of the correspondence. The potential of this procedure for applications of scalar field models in astrophysical and cosmological scenarios is highlighted.

We show that families of nonlinear gravity theories formulated in a metric-affine approach and coupled to a nonlinear theory of electrodynamics can be mapp