No Arabic abstract
Cosmic voids in the large-scale structure of the Universe affect the peculiar motions of objects in their vicinity. Although these motions are difficult to observe directly, the clustering pattern of their surrounding tracers in redshift space is influenced in a unique way. This allows to investigate the interplay between densities and velocities around voids, which is solely dictated by the laws of gravity. With the help of $N$-body simulations and derived mock-galaxy catalogs we calculate the average density fluctuations around voids identified with a watershed algorithm in redshift space and compare the results with the expectation from general relativity and the $Lambda$CDM model. We find linear theory to work remarkably well in describing the dynamics of voids. Adopting a Bayesian inference framework, we explore the full posterior of our model parameters and forecast the achievable accuracy on measurements of the growth rate of structure and the geometric distortion through the Alcock-Paczynski effect. Systematic errors in the latter are reduced from $sim15%$ to $sim5%$ when peculiar velocities are taken into account. The relative parameter uncertainties in galaxy surveys with number densities comparable to the SDSS MAIN (CMASS) sample probing a volume of $1h^{-3}{rm Gpc}^3$ yield $sigma_{f/b}left/(f/b)right.sim2%$ ($20%$) and $sigma_{D_AH}/D_AHsim0.2%$ ($2%$), respectively. At this level of precision the linear-theory model becomes systematics dominated, with parameter biases that fall beyond these values. Nevertheless, the presented method is highly model independent; its viability lies in the underlying assumption of statistical isotropy of the Universe.
We perform a comprehensive redshift-space distortion analysis based on cosmic voids in the large-scale distribution of galaxies observed with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. To this end, we measure multipoles of the void-galaxy cross-correlation function and compare them with standard model predictions in cosmology. Merely considering linear-order theory allows us to accurately describe the data on the entire available range of scales and to probe void-centric distances down to about $2h^{-1}{rm Mpc}$. Common systematics, such as the Fingers-of-God effect, scale-dependent galaxy bias, and nonlinear clustering do not seem to play a significant role in our analysis. We constrain the growth rate of structure via the redshift-space distortion parameter $beta$ at two median redshifts, $beta(bar{z}=0.32)=0.599^{+0.134}_{-0.124}$ and $beta(bar{z}=0.54)=0.457^{+0.056}_{-0.054}$, with a precision that is competitive with state-of-the-art galaxy-clustering results. While the high-redshift constraint perfectly agrees with model expectations, we observe a mild $2sigma$ deviation at $bar{z}=0.32$, which increases to $3sigma$ when the data is restricted to the lowest available redshift range of $0.15<z<0.33$.
We have derived estimators for the linear growth rate of density fluctuations using the cross-correlation function of voids and haloes in redshift space, both directly and in Fourier form. In linear theory, this cross-correlation contains only monopole and quadrupole terms. At scales greater than the void radius, linear theory is a good match to voids traced out by haloes in N-body simulations; small-scale random velocities are unimportant at these radii, only tending to cause small and often negligible elongation of the redshift-space cross-correlation function near its origin. By extracting the monopole and quadrupole from the cross-correlation function, we measure the linear growth rate without prior knowledge of the void profile or velocity dispersion. We recover the linear growth parameter $beta$ to 9% precision from an effective volume of 3(Gpc/h)^3 using voids with radius greater than 25Mpc/h. Smaller voids are predominantly sub-voids, which may be more sensitive to the random velocity dispersion; they introduce noise and do not help to improve the measurement. Adding velocity dispersion as a free parameter allows us to use information at radii as small as half of the void radius. The precision on $beta$ is reduced to approximately 5%. Contrary to the simple redshift-space distortion pattern in overdensities, voids show diverse shapes in redshift space, and can appear either elongated or flattened along the line of sight. This can be explained by the competing amplitudes of the local density contrast, plus the radial velocity profile and its gradient, with the latter two factors being determined by the cumulative density profile of voids. The distortion pattern is therefore determined solely by the void profile and is different for void-in-cloud and void-in-void. This diversity of redshift-space void morphology complicates measurements of the Alcock-Paczynski effect using voids.
Dark energy may be the first sign of new fundamental physics in the Universe, taking either a physical form or revealing a correction to Einsteinian gravity. Weak gravitational lensing and galaxy peculiar velocities provide complementary probes of General Relativity, and in combination allow us to test modified theories of gravity in a unique way. We perform such an analysis by combining measurements of cosmic shear tomography from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) with the growth of structure from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey and the Six-degree-Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), producing the strongest existing joint constraints on the metric potentials that describe general theories of gravity. For scale-independent modifications to the metric potentials which evolve linearly with the effective dark energy density, we find present-day cosmological deviations in the Newtonian potential and curvature potential from the prediction of General Relativity to be (Delta Psi)/Psi = 0.05 pm 0.25 and (Delta Phi)/Phi = -0.05 pm 0.3 respectively (68 per cent CL).
The peculiar motion of galaxies can be a particularly sensitive probe of gravitational collapse. As such, it can be used to measure the dynamics of dark matter and dark energy as well the nature of the gravitational laws at play on cosmological scales. Peculiar motions manifest themselves as an overall anisotropy in the measured clustering signal as a function of the angle to the line-of-sight, known as redshift-space distortion (RSD). Limiting factors in this measurement include our ability to model non-linear galaxy motions on small scales and the complexities of galaxy bias. The anisotropy in the measured clustering pattern in redshift-space is also driven by the unknown distance factors at the redshift in question, the Alcock-Paczynski distortion. This weakens growth rate measurements, but permits an extra geometric probe of the Hubble expansion rate. In this chapter we will briefly describe the scientific background to the RSD technique, and forecast the potential of the SKA phase 1 and the SKA2 to measure the growth rate using both galaxy catalogues and intensity mapping, assessing their competitiveness with current and future optical galaxy surveys.
We present measurements of the spatial clustering statistics in redshift space of various scalar field modified gravity simulations. We utilise the two-point and the three-point correlation functions to quantify the spatial distribution of dark matter halos within these simulations and thus discern between the models. We compare $Lambda$CDM simulations to various modified gravity scenarios and find consistency with previous work in terms of 2-point statistics in real and redshift-space. However using higher order statistics such as the three-point correlation function in redshift space we find significant deviations from $Lambda$CDM hinting that higher order statistics may prove to be a useful tool in the hunt for deviations from General Relativity.