No Arabic abstract
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.
Modifications of General Relativity leave their imprint both on the cosmic expansion history through a non-trivial dark energy equation of state, and on the evolution of cosmological perturbations in the scalar and in the tensor sectors. In particular, the modification in the tensor sector gives rise to a notion of gravitational-wave (GW) luminosity distance, different from the standard electromagnetic luminosity distance, that can be studied with standard sirens at GW detectors such as LISA or third-generation ground based experiments. We discuss the predictions for modified GW propagation from some of the best studied theories of modified gravity, such as Horndeski or the more general degenerate higher order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theories, non-local infrared modifications of gravity, bigravity theories and the corresponding phenomenon of GW oscillation, as well as theories with extra or varying dimensions. We show that modified GW propagation is a completely generic phenomenon in modified gravity. We then use a simple parametrization of the effect in terms of two parameters $(Xi_0,n)$, that is shown to fit well the results from a large class of models, to study the prospects of observing modified GW propagation using supermassive black hole binaries as standard sirens with LISA. We construct mock source catalogs and perform detailed Markov Chain Monte Carlo studies of the likelihood obtained from LISA standard sirens alone, as well as by combining them with CMB, BAO and SNe data to reduce the degeneracies between cosmological parameters. We find that the combination of LISA with the other cosmological datasets allows one to measure the parameter $Xi_0$ that characterizes modified GW propagation to the percent level accuracy, sufficient to test several modified gravity theories. [Abridged]
We test Einstein gravity using cosmological observations of both expansion and structure growth, including the latest data from supernovae (Union2.1), CMB (WMAP7), weak lensing (CFHTLS) and peculiar velocity of galaxies (WiggleZ). We fit modified gravity parameters of the generalized Poisson equations simultaneously with the effective equation of state for the background evolution, exploring the covariances and model dependence. The results show that general relativity is a good fit to the combined data. Using a Pad{e} approximant form for the gravity deviations accurately captures the time and scale dependence for theories like $f(R)$ and DGP gravity, and weights high and low redshift probes fairly. For current observations, cosmic growth and expansion can be fit simultaneously with little degradation in accuracy, while removing the possibility of bias from holding one aspect fixed.
We explore the cosmological implications of five modified gravity (MG) models by using the recent cosmological observational data, including the recently released SNLS3 type Ia supernovae sample, the cosmic microwave background anisotropy data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7-yr observations, the baryon acoustic oscillation results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7, and the latest Hubble constant measurement utilizing the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The MG models considered include the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati(DGP) model, two $f(R)$ models, and two $f(T)$ models. We find that compared with the $Lambda$CDM model, MG models can not lead to a appreciable reduction of the $chi^2_{min}$. The analysis of AIC and BIC shows that the simplest cosmological constant model($Lambda$CDM) is still most preferred by the current data, and the DGP model is strongly disfavored. In addition, from the observational constraints, we also reconstruct the evolutions of the growth factor in these models. We find that the current available growth factor data are not enough to distinguish these MG models from the $Lambda$CDM model.
The standard LambdaCDM model based on General Relativity (GR) including cold dark matter (CDM) is very successful at fitting cosmological observations, but recent non-detections of candidate dark matter (DM) particles mean that various modified-gravity theories remain of significant interest. The latter generally involve modifications to GR below a critical acceleration scale $sim 10^{-10} , m , s^{-2}$. Wide-binary (WB) star systems with separations $> 5 , kAU$ provide an interesting test for modified gravity, due to being in or near the low-acceleration regime and presumably containing negligible DM. Here, we explore the prospects for new observations pending from the GAIA spacecraft to provide tests of GR against MOND or TeVes-like theories in a regime only partially explored to date. In particular, we find that a histogram of (3D) binary relative velocities against circular velocity predicted from the (2D) projected separations predicts a rather sharp feature in this distribution for standard gravity, with an 80th (90th) percentile value close to 1.025 (1.14) with rather weak dependence on the eccentricity distribution. However, MOND/TeVeS theories produce a shifted distribution, with a significant increase in these upper percentiles. In MOND-like theories {em without} an external field effect, there are large shifts of order unity. With the external field effect included, the shifts are considerably reduced to $sim 0.04 - 0.08$, but are still potentially detectable statistically given reasonably large samples and good control of contaminants. In principle, followup of GAIA-selected wide binaries with ground-based radial velocities accurate to < 0.03 km/s should be able to produce an interesting new constraint on modified-gravity theories.
We propose a new cosmological framework in which the strength of the gravitational force acted on dark matter at late time can be weaker than that on the standard matter fields without introducing extra gravitational degrees of freedom. The framework integrates dark matter into a type-II minimally modified gravity that was recently proposed as a dark energy mimicker. The idea that makes such a framework possible consists of coupling a dark matter Lagrangian and a cosmological constant to the metric in a canonically transformed frame of general relativity (GR). On imposing a gauge fixing constraint, which explicitly breaks the temporal diffeomorphism invariance, we keep the number of gravitational degrees of freedom to be two, as in GR. We then make the inverse canonical transformation to bring the theory back to the original frame, where one can add the standard matter fields. This framework contains two free functions of time which specify the generating functional of the above mentioned canonical transformation and which are then used in order to realize desired time evolutions of both the Hubble expansion rate $H(z)$ and the effective gravitational constant for dark matter $G_{rm eff}(z)$. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide a new framework to address the two puzzles present in todays cosmology, i.e. the $H_0$ tension and the $S_8$ tension, simultaneously. When the dark matter is cold in this framework, we dub the corresponding cosmological model the V Canonical Cold Dark Matter (VCCDM), as the cosmological constant $Lambda$ in the standard $Lambda$CDM is replaced by a function $V(phi)$ of an auxiliary field $phi$ and the CDM is minimally coupled to the metric in a canonically transformed frame.