No Arabic abstract
In a recent work, Baldi et al. highlighted the issue of cosmic degeneracies, consisting in the fact that the standard statistics of the large-scale structure might not be sufficient to conclusively test cosmological models beyond $Lambda $CDM when multiple extensions of the standard scenario coexist in nature. In particular, it was shown that the characteristic features of an $f(R)$ Modified Gravity theory and of massive neutrinos with an appreciable total mass $Sigma _{i}m_{ u _{i}}$ are suppressed in most of the basic large-scale structure observables for a specific combination of the main parameters of the two non-standard models. In the present work, we explore the possibility that the mean specific size of the supercluster spines -- which was recently proposed as a non-standard statistics by Shim and Lee to probe gravity at large scales -- can help to break this cosmic degeneracy. By analyzing the halo samples from N-body simulations featuring various combinations of $f(R)$ and $Sigma _{i}m_{ u _{i}}$ we find that -- at the present epoch -- the value of $Sigma _{i}m_{ u _{i}}$ required to maximally suppress the effects of $f(R)$ gravity on the specific sizes of the superclusters spines is different from that found for the other standard statistics. Furthermore, it is also shown that at higher redshifts ($zge 0.3$) the deviations of the mean specific sizes of the supercluster spines for all of the four considered combinations from its value for the standard $Lambda$CDM case are statistically significant.
Cosmic voids are progressively emerging as a new viable cosmological probe. Their abundance and density profiles are sensitive to modifications of gravity, as well as to dark energy and neutrinos. The main goal of this work is to investigate the possibility of exploiting cosmic void statistics to disentangle the degeneracies resulting from a proper combination of $f(R)$ modified gravity and neutrino mass. We use N-body simulations to analyse the density profiles and size function of voids traced by both dark matter particles and haloes. We find clear evidence of the enhancement of gravity in $f(R)$ cosmologies in the void density profiles at $z=1$. However, these effects can be almost completely overridden by the presence of massive neutrinos because of their thermal free-streaming. Despite the limited volume of the analysed simulations does not allow us to achieve a statistically relevant abundance of voids larger than $40 mathrm{Mpc}/h$, we find that the void size function at high redshifts and for large voids is potentially an effective probe to disentangle these degenerate cosmological models, which is key in the prospective of the upcoming wide field redshift surveys.
We use the cosmic shear data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey to place constraints on $f(R)$ and {it Generalized Dilaton} models of modified gravity. This is highly complimentary to other probes since the constraints mainly come from the non-linear scales: maximal deviations with respects to the General-Relativity + $Lambda$CDM scenario occurs at $ksim1 h mbox{Mpc}^{-1}$. At these scales, it becomes necessary to account for known degeneracies with baryon feedback and massive neutrinos, hence we place constraints jointly on these three physical effects. To achieve this, we formulate these modified gravity theories within a common tomographic parameterization, we compute their impact on the clustering properties relative to a GR universe, and propagate the observed modifications into the weak lensing $xi_{pm}$ quantity. Confronted against the cosmic shear data, we reject the $f(R)$ ${ |f_{R_0}|=10^{-4}, n=1}$ model with more than 99.9% confidence interval (CI) when assuming a $Lambda$CDM dark matter only model. In the presence of baryonic feedback processes and massive neutrinos with total mass up to 0.2eV, the model is disfavoured with at least 94% CI in all different combinations studied. Constraints on the ${ |f_{R_0}|=10^{-4}, n=2}$ model are weaker, but nevertheless disfavoured with at least 89% CI. We identify several specific combinations of neutrino mass, baryon feedback and $f(R)$ or Dilaton gravity models that are excluded by the current cosmic shear data. Notably, universes with three massless neutrinos and no baryon feedback are strongly disfavoured in all modified gravity scenarios studied. These results indicate that competitive constraints may be achieved with future cosmic shear data.
The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) and an accompanying electromagnetic (E/M) counterpart have been suggested as a future probe for cosmology and theories of gravity. In this paper, we present calculations of the luminosity distance of sources taking into account inhomogeneities in the matter distribution that are predicted in numerical simulations of structure formation. In addition, we show that inhomogeneities resulting from clustering of matter can mimic certain classes of modified gravity theories, or other effects that dampen GW amplitudes, and deviations larger than $delta u sim mathcal{O}(0.1) (99% rm{C.L.})$ to the extra friction term $ u$, from zero, would be necessary to distinguish them. For these, we assume mock GWs sources, with known redshift, based on binary population synthesis models, between redshifts $z=0$ and $z=5$. We show that future GW detectors, like Einstein Telescope or Cosmic Explorer, will be needed for strong constraints on the inhomogeneity parameters and breaking the degeneracy between modified gravity effects and matter anisotropies by measuring $ u$ at $5 %$ and $1 %$ level with $100$ and $350$ events respectively.
This work investigates the alignment of galactic spins with the cosmic web across cosmic time using the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Horizon-AGN. The cosmic web structure is extracted via the persistent skeleton as implemented in the DISPERSE algorithm. It is found that the spin of low-mass galaxies is more likely to be aligned with the filaments of the cosmic web and to lie within the plane of the walls while more massive galaxies tend to have a spin perpendicular to the axis of the filaments and to the walls. The mass transition is detected with a significance of 9 sigmas. This galactic alignment is consistent with the alignment of the spin of dark haloes found in pure dark matter simulations and with predictions from (anisotropic) tidal torque theory. However, unlike haloes, the alignment of low-mass galaxies is weak and disappears at low redshifts while the orthogonal spin orientation of massive galaxies is strong and increases with time, probably as a result of mergers. At fixed mass, alignments are correlated with galaxy morphology: the high-redshift alignment is dominated by spiral galaxies while elliptical centrals are mainly responsible for the perpendicular signal. These predictions for spin alignments with respect to cosmic filaments and unprecendently walls are successfully compared with existing observations. The alignment of the shape of galaxies with the different components of the cosmic web is also investigated. A coherent and stronger signal is found in terms of shape at high mass. The two regimes probed in this work induce competing galactic alignment signals for weak lensing, with opposite redshift and luminosity evolution. Understanding the details of these intrinsic alignments will be key to exploit future major cosmic shear surveys like Euclid or LSST.
The $Lambda$CDM concordance model is very successful at describing our Universe with high accuracy and few parameters. Despite its successes, a few tensions persist; most notably, the best-fit $Lambda$CDM model, as derived from the Planck CMB data, largely overpredicts the abundance of SZ clusters when using their standard mass calibration. Whether this is a sign of an incorrect calibration or the need for new physics remains a matter of debate. Here we examined two simple extensions of the standard model and their ability to release this tension: massive neutrinos and a simple modified gravity model via a non-standard growth index $gamma$. We used both the Planck CMB and SZ cluster counts as datasets, with or without local X-ray clusters. In the case of massive neutrinos, the SZ calibration $(1-b)$ is constrained to $0.59^{+0.03}_{-0.04}$ (68%), more than 5$sigma$ away from its standard value $sim0.8$. We found little correlation between $sum m_ u$ and $(1-b)$, corroborating previous conclusions derived from X-ray clusters; massive neutrinos do not alleviate the cluster-CMB tension. With our simple $gamma$ model, we found a large correlation between calibration and growth index but contrary to local X-ray clusters, SZ clusters are able to break the degeneracy between the two thanks to their extended $z$ range. The calibration $(1-b)$ was then constrained to $0.60^{+0.05}_{-0.07}$, leading to an interesting constraint on $gamma=0.60pm 0.13$. When both massive neutrinos and modified gravity were allowed, preferred values remained centred on standard $Lambda$CDM values, but $(1-b)sim0.8$ was allowed (though only at the $2sigma$ level) provided $sum m_ usim0.34 $ eV and $gammasim0.8$. We conclude that massive neutrinos do not relieve the cluster-CMB tension and that a calibration close to the standard value $0.8$ would call for new physics in the gravitational sector.