No Arabic abstract
We introduce the method and the implementation of a cosmological simulation of a class of metric-variation f(R) models that accelerate the cosmological expansion without a cosmological constant and evade solar-system bounds of small-field deviations to general relativity. Such simulations are shown to reduce to solving a non-linear Poisson equation for the scalar degree of freedom introduced by the f(R) modifications. We detail the method to efficiently solve the non-linear Poisson equation by using a Newton-Gauss-Seidel relaxation scheme coupled with multigrid method to accelerate the convergence. The simulations are shown to satisfy tests comparing the simulated outcome to analytical solutions for simple situations, and the dynamics of the simulations are tested with orbital and Zeldovich collapse tests. Finally, we present several static and dynamical simulations using realistic cosmological parameters to highlight the differences between standard physics and f(R) physics. In general, we find that the f(R) modifications result in stronger gravitational attraction that enhances the dark matter power spectrum by ~20% for large but observationally allowed f(R) modifications. More detailed study of the non-linear f(R) effects on the power spectrum are presented in a companion paper.
We carry out a suite of cosmological simulations of modified action f(R) models where cosmic acceleration arises from an alteration of gravity instead of dark energy. These models introduce an extra scalar degree of freedom which enhances the force of gravity below the inverse mass or Compton scale of the scalar. The simulations exhibit the so-called chameleon mechanism, necessary for satisfying local constraints on gravity, where this scale depends on environment, in particular the depth of the local gravitational potential. We find that the chameleon mechanism can substantially suppress the enhancement of power spectrum in the non-linear regime if the background field value is comparable to or smaller than the depth of the gravitational potentials of typical structures. Nonetheless power spectrum enhancements at intermediate scales remain at a measurable level for models even when the expansion history is indistinguishable from a cosmological constant, cold dark matter model. Simple scaling relations that take the linear power spectrum into a non-linear spectrum fail to capture the modifications of f(R) due to the change in collapsed structures, the chameleon mechanism, and the time evolution of the modifications.
The statistical properties of dark matter halos, the building blocks of cosmological observables associated with structure in the universe, offer many opportunities to test models for cosmic acceleration, especially those that seek to modify gravitational forces. We study the abundance, bias and profiles of halos in cosmological simulations for one such model: the modified action f(R) theory. In the large field regime that is accessible to current observations, enhanced gravitational forces raise the abundance of rare massive halos and decrease their bias but leave their (lensing) mass profiles largely unchanged. This regime is well described by scaling relations based on a modification of spherical collapse calculations. In the small field regime, enhanced forces are suppressed inside halos and the effects on halo properties are substantially reduced for the most massive halos. Nonetheless, the scaling relations still retain limited applicability for the purpose of establishing conservative upper limits on the modification to gravity.
We investigate the qualitative evolution of (D+1)-dimensional cosmological models in f(R) gravity for the general case of the function f(R). The analysis is specified for various examples, including the (D+1)-dimensional generalization of the Starobinsky model, models with polynomial and exponential functions. The cosmological dynamics are compared in the Einstein and Jordan representations of the corresponding scalar-tensor theory. The features of the cosmological evolution are discussed for Einstein frame potentials taking negative values in certain regions of the field space.
Modifications of the equations of general relativity at large distances offer one possibility to explain the observed properties of our Universe without invoking a cosmological constant. Numerous proposals for such modified gravity cosmologies exist, but often their consequences for structure formation in the non-linear sector are not yet accurately known. In this work, we employ high-resolution numerical simulations of f(R)-gravity models coupled with a semi-analytic model (SAM) for galaxy formation to obtain detailed predictions for the evolution of galaxy properties. The f(R)-gravity models imply the existence of a `fifth-force, which is however locally suppressed, preserving the successes of general relativity on solar system scales. We show that dark matter haloes in f(R)-gravity models are characterized by a modified virial scaling with respect to the LCDM scenario, reflecting a higher dark matter velocity dispersion at a given mass. This effect is taken into account in the SAM by an appropriate modification of the mass--temperature relation. We find that the statistical properties predicted for galaxies (such as the stellar mass function and the cosmic star formation rate) in f(R)-gravity show generally only very small differences relative to LCDM, smaller than the dispersion between the results of different SAM models, which can be viewed as a measure of their systematic uncertainty. We also demonstrate that galaxy bias is not able to disentangle between f(R)-gravity and the standard cosmological scenario. However, f(R)-gravity imprints modifications in the linear growth rate of cosmic structures at large scale, which can be recovered from the statistical properties of large galaxy samples.
We present two-point correlation function statistics of the mass and the halos in the chameleon $f(R)$ modified gravity scenario using a series of large volume N-body simulations. Three distinct variations of $f(R)$ are considered (F4, F5 and F6) and compared to a fiducial $Lambda$CDM model in the redshift range $z in [0,1]$. We find that the matter clustering is indistinguishable for all models except for F4, which shows a significantly steeper slope. The ratio of the redshift- to real-space correlation function at scales $> 20 h^{-1} mathrm{Mpc}$ agrees with the linear General Relativity (GR) Kaiser formula for the viable $f(R)$ models considered. We consider three halo populations characterized by spatial abundances comparable to that of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and galaxy clusters. The redshift-space halo correlation functions of F4 and F5 deviate significantly from $Lambda$CDM at intermediate and high redshift, as the $f(R)$ halo bias is smaller or equal to that of the $Lambda$CDM case. Finally we introduce a new model independent clustering statistic to distinguish $f(R)$ from GR: the relative halo clustering ratio -- $mathcal{R}$. The sampling required to adequately reduce the scatter in $mathcal{R}$ will be available with the advent of the next generation galaxy redshift surveys. This will foster a prospective avenue to obtain largely model-independent cosmological constraints on this class of modified gravity models.