No Arabic abstract
One of the most pressing questions in modified gravity is how deviations from general relativity can manifest in upcoming galaxy surveys. This is especially relevant for theories exhibiting Vainshtein screening, where such deviations are efficiently suppressed within a (typically large) Vainshtein radius. However, Vainshtein screening is known to be shape dependent: it is most effective around spherical sources, weaker around cylindrical objects and completely absent for planar sources. The Cosmic Web therefore offers a testing ground, as it displays many shapes in the form of clusters, filaments and walls. In this work, we explicitly derive the signature of the shape dependence of Vainshtein screening on the matter bispectrum, by considering a cubic Galileon model with a conformal coupling to matter and a cosmological constant. We perform a second order perturbative analysis, deriving analytic, integral expressions for the bispectrum, which we integrate using hi_class. We find that the shape dependence of Vainshtein screening enters the bispectrum with a unique scale-factor dependence of $propto a^{3/2}$. The magnitude of the effect today is up to 2 % for a model whose linear growth rate deviates up to 5 % from $Lambda$CDM.
We investigate the dependence of the Vainshtein screening mechanism on the cosmic web morphology of both dark matter particles and halos as determined by ORIGAMI. Unlike chameleon and symmetron screening, which come into effect in regions of high density, Vainshtein screening instead depends on the dimensionality of the system, and screened bodies can still feel external fields. ORIGAMI is well-suited to this problem because it defines morphologies according to the dimensionality of the collapsing structure and does not depend on a smoothing scale or density threshold parameter. We find that halo particles are screened while filament, wall, and void particles are unscreened, and this is independent of the particle density. However, after separating halos according to their large scale morphological environment, we find no difference in the screening properties of halos in filaments versus halos in clusters. We find that the fifth force enhancement of dark matter particles in halos is greatest well outside the virial radius. We confirm the theoretical expectation that even if the internal field is suppressed by the Vainshtein mechanism, the object still feels the fifth force generated by the external fields, by measuring peculiar velocities and velocity dispersions of halos. Finally, we investigate the morphology and gravity model dependence of halo spins, concentrations, and shapes.
Chameleon scalar fields can screen their associated fifth forces from detection by changing their mass with the local density. These models are an archetypal example of a screening mechanism, and have become an important target for both cosmological surveys and terrestrial experiments. In particular there has been much recent interest in searching for chameleon fifth forces in the laboratory. It is known that the chameleon force is less screened around non-spherical sources, but only the field profiles around a few simple shapes are known analytically. In this work we introduce a numerical code that solves for the chameleon field around arbitrary shapes with azimuthal symmetry placed in a spherical vacuum chamber. We find that deviations from spherical symmetry can increase the chameleon acceleration experienced by a test particle by up to a factor of $sim 3$, and that the least screened objects are those which minimize some internal dimension.
We study perturbation theory for large-scale structure in the most general scalar-tensor theories propagating a single scalar degree of freedom, which include Horndeski theories and beyond. We model the parameter space using the effective field theory of dark energy. For Horndeski theories, the gravitational field and fluid equations are invariant under a combination of time-dependent transformations of the coordinates and fields. This symmetry allows one to construct a physical adiabatic mode which fixes the perturbation-theory kernels in the squeezed limit and ensures that the well-known consistency relations for large-scale structure, originally derived in general relativity, hold in modified gravity as well. For theories beyond Horndeski, instead, one generally cannot construct such an adiabatic mode. Because of this, the perturbation-theory kernels are modified in the squeezed limit and the consistency relations for large-scale structure do not hold. We show, however, that the modification of the squeezed limit depends only on the linear theory. We investigate the observational consequences of this violation by computing the matter bispectrum. In the squeezed limit, the largest effect is expected when considering the cross-correlation between different tracers. Moreover, the individual contributions to the 1-loop matter power spectrum do not cancel in the infrared limit of the momentum integral, modifying the power spectrum on non-linear scales.
We study the angular bispectrum of local type arising from the (possibly correlated) combination of a primordial adiabatic mode with an isocurvature one. Generically, this bispectrum can be decomposed into six elementary bispectra. We estimate how precisely CMB data, including polarization, can enable us to measure or constrain the six corresponding amplitudes, considering separately the four types of isocurvature modes (CDM, baryon, neutrino density, neutrino velocity). Finally, we discuss how the model-independent constraints on the bispectrum can be combined to get constraints on the parameters of multiple-field inflation models.
We study the effect of weak lensing by cosmic (super-)strings on the higher-order statistics of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). A cosmic string segment is expected to cause weak lensing as well as an integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect, the so-called Gott-Kaiser-Stebbins (GKS) effect, to the CMB temperature fluctuation, which are thus naturally cross-correlated. We point out that, in the presence of such a correlation, yet another kind of the post-recombination CMB temperature bispectra, the ISW-lensing bispectra, will arise in the form of products of the auto- and cross-power spectra. We first present an analytic method to calculate the autocorrelation of the temperature fluctuations induced by the strings, and the cross-correlation between the temperature fluctuation and the lensing potential both due to the string network. In our formulation, the evolution of the string network is assumed to be characterized by the simple analytic model, the velocity-dependent one scale model, and the intercommutation probability is properly incorporated in orderto characterize the possible superstringy nature. Furthermore, the obtained power spectra are dominated by the Poisson-distributed string segments, whose correlations are assumed to satisfy the simple relations. We then estimate the signal-to-noise ratios of the string-induced ISW-lensing bispectra and discuss the detectability of such CMB signals from the cosmic string network. It is found that in the case of the smaller string tension, $Gmull 10^{-7}$,, the ISW-lensing bispectrum induced by a cosmic string network can constrain the string-model parameters even more tightly than the purely GKS-induced bispectrum in the ongoing and future CMB observations on small scales.