No Arabic abstract
We introduce the idea of {it effective} dark matter halo catalog in $f(R)$ gravity, which is built using the {it effective} density field. Using a suite of high resolution N-body simulations, we find that the dynamical properties of halos, such as the distribution of density, velocity dispersion, specific angular momentum and spin, in the effective catalog of $f(R)$ gravity closely mimic those in the $Lambda$CDM model. Thus, when using effective halos, an $f(R)$ model can be viewed as a $Lambda$CDM model. This effective catalog therefore provides a convenient way for studying the baryonic physics, the galaxy halo occupation distribution and even semi-analytical galaxy formation in $f(R)$ cosmologies.
Using N-body simulations, we measure the power spectrum of the effective dark matter density field, which is defined through the modified Poisson equation in $f(R)$ cosmologies. We find that when compared to the conventional dark matter power spectrum, the effective power spectrum deviates more significantly from the $Lambda$CDM model. For models with $f_{R0}=-10^{-4}$, the deviation can exceed 150% while the deviation of the conventional matter power spectrum is less than 50%. Even for models with $f_{R0}=-10^{-6}$, for which the conventional matter power spectrum is very close to the $Lambda$CDM prediction, the effective power spectrum shows sizeable deviations. Our results indicate that traditional analyses based on the dark matter density field may seriously underestimate the impact of $f(R)$ gravity on galaxy clustering. We therefore suggest the use of the effective density field in such studies. In addition, based on our findings, we also discuss several possible methods of making use of the differences between the conventional and effective dark matter power spectra in $f(R)$ gravity to discriminate the theory from the $Lambda$CDM model.
The logarithmic $R^2$-corrected $F(R)$ gravity is investigated as a prototype model of modified gravity theories with quantum corrections. By using the auxiliary field method, the model is described by the general relativity with a scalaron field. The scalaron field can be identified as an inflaton at the primordial inflation era. It is also one of the dark matter candidates in the dark energy era. It is found that a wide range of the parameters is consistent with the current observations of CMB fluctuations, dark energy and dark matter.
We present for the first time the outcomes of a cosmological N-body simulation that simultaneously implements a Warm Dark Matter (WDM) particle candidate and a modified gravitational interaction in the form of $f(R)$ gravity, and compare its results with the individual effects of these two independent extensions of the standard $Lambda $CDM scenario, and with the reference cosmology itself. We consider a rather extreme value of the WDM particle mass ($m_{rm WDM}=0.4$ keV) and a single realisation of $f(R)$ gravity with $|bar{f}_{R0}|=10^{-5}$, and we investigate the impact of these models and of their combination on a wide range of cosmological observables with the aim to identify possible observational degeneracies. In particular, we focus on the large-scale matter distribution, as well as on the statistical and structural properties of collapsed halos and cosmic voids. Differently from the case of combining $f(R)$ gravity with massive neutrinos -- previously investigated in Baldi et al. (2014) -- we find that most of the considered observables do not show any significant degeneracy due to the fact that WDM and $f(R)$ gravity are characterised by individual observational footprints with a very different functional dependence on cosmic scales and halo masses. In particular, this is the case for the nonlinear matter power spectrum in real space, for the halo and sub-halo mass functions, for the halo density profiles and for the concentration-mass relation. However, other observables -- like e.g. the halo bias -- do show some level of degeneracy between the two models, while a very strong degeneracy is observed for the nonlinear matter power spectrum in redshift space, for the density profiles of small cosmic voids -- with radius below $approx 5$ Mpc$/h$ -- and for the voids abundance as a function of the void core density.
We study the matter and velocity divergence power spectra in a f(R) gravity theory and their time evolution measured from several large-volume N-body simulations with varying box sizes and resolution. We find that accurate prediction of the matter power spectrum in f(R) gravity places stronger requirements on the simulation than is the case with LCDM, because of the nonlinear nature of the fifth force. Linear perturbation theory is shown to be a poor approximation for the f(R) models, except when the chameleon effect is very weak. We show that the relative differences from the fiducial LCDM model are much more pronounced in the nonlinear tail of the velocity divergence power spectrum than in the matter power spectrum, which suggests that future surveys which target the collection of peculiar velocity data will open new opportunities to constrain modified gravity theories. A close investigation of the time evolution of the power spectra shows that there is a pattern in the evolution history, which can be explained by the properties of the chameleon-type fifth force in f(R) gravity. Varying the model parameter |f_R0|, which quantifies the strength of the departure from standard gravity, mainly varies the epoch marking the onset of the fifth force, as a result of which the different f(R) models are in different stages of the same evolutionary path at any given time
Modified Gravity (MG) scenarios have been advocated to account for the dark energy phenomenon in the universe. These models predict departures from General Relativity on large cosmic scales that can be tested through a variety of probes such as observations of galaxy clusters among others. Here, we investigate the imprint of MG models on the internal mass distribution of cluster-like halos as probed by the dark matter halo sparsity. To this purpose we perform a comparative analysis of the properties of the halo sparsity using N-body simulation halo catalogs of a standard flat $Lambda$CDM model and MG scenarios from the DUSTGRAIN-pathfinder simulation suite. We find that the onset of the screening mechanism leaves a distinct signature in the redshift evolution of the ensemble average halos sparsity. Measurements of the sparsity of galaxy clusters from currently available mass estimates are unable to test MG models due to the large uncertainties on the cluster masses. We show that this should be possible in the future provided large cluster samples with cluster masses determined to better than $30%$ accuracy level.