No Arabic abstract
In this work, we obtain measurements of the Hubble constant in the context of modified gravity theories. We set up our theoretical framework by considering viable cosmological $f(R)$ and $f(T)$ models, and we analyzed them through the use of geometrical data sets obtained in a model-independent way, namely, gravitationally lensed quasars with measured time delays, standard clocks from cosmic chronometers, and standard candles from the Pantheon Supernovae Ia sample. We find $H_0=(72.4pm 1.4)$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ and $H_0=(71.5pm 1.3)$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ for the $f(R)$ and $f(T)$ models, respectively. Our results represent 1.9% and 1.8% measurements of the Hubble constant, which are fully consistent with the local estimate of $H_0$ by the Hubble Space Telescope. We do not find significant departures from general relativity, as our study shows that the characteristic parameters of the extensions of gravity beyond general relativity are compatible with the $Lambda$CDM cosmology. Moreover, within the standard cosmological framework, our full joint analysis suggests that it is possible to measure the dark energy equation of state parameter at 1.2% accuracy, although we find no statistical evidence for deviations from the cosmological constant case.
We present a model of Early Modified Gravity (EMG) consisting in a scalar field $sigma$ with a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci curvature of the type $M^2_{rm pl}+xi sigma^2$ plus a cosmological constant and a small effective mass and demonstrate its ability to alleviate the $H_0$ tension while providing a good fit to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) data. In this model the scalar field, frozen deep in the radiation era, grows around the redshift of matter-radiation equality because of the coupling to non-relativistic matter. The small effective mass, which we consider here as induced by a quartic potential, then damps the scalar field into coherent oscillations around its minimum at $sigma=0$, leading to a weaker gravitational strength at early times and naturally recovering the consistency with laboratory and Solar System tests of gravity. We analyze the capability of EMG with positive $xi$ to fit current cosmological observations and compare our results to the case without an effective mass and to the popular early dark energy models with $xi=0$. We show that EMG with a quartic coupling of the order of $lambdasimmathcal{O}({rm eV}^4/M_{rm pl}^4)$ can substantially alleviate the $H_0$ tension also when the full shape of the matter power spectrum is included in the fit in addition to CMB and Supernovae (SN) data.
In the context of a Hubble tension problem that is growing in its statistical significance, we reconsider the effectiveness of non-parametric reconstruction techniques which are independent of prescriptive cosmological models. By taking cosmic chronometers, Type Ia Supernovae and baryonic acoustic oscillation data, we compare and contrast two important reconstruction approaches, namely Gaussian processes (GP) and the Locally weighted Scatterplot Smoothing together with Simulation and extrapolation method (LOESS-Simex or LS). We firstly show how both GP and LOESS-Simex can be used to successively reconstruct various data sets to a high level of precision. We then directly compare both approaches in a quantitative manner by considering several factors, such as how well the reconstructions approximate the data sets themselves to how their respective uncertainties evolve. In light of the puzzling Hubble tension, it is important to consider how the uncertain regions evolve over redshift and the methods compare for estimating cosmological parameters at current times. For cosmic chronometers and baryonic acoustic oscillation compiled data sets, we find that GP generically produce smaller variances for the reconstructed data with a minimum value of $sigma_{rm GP-min} = 1.1$, while the situation for LS is totally different with a minimum of $sigma_{rm LS-min} = 50.8$. Moreover, some of these characteristics can be alliviate at low $z$, where LS presents less underestimation in comparison to GP.
We present a detailed analysis of the impact of $H_0$ priors from recent surveys in the literature on the late time cosmology of five $f(T)$ cosmological models using cosmic chronometers, the Pantheon data set, and baryonic acoustic oscillation data. In this work, we use three recently reported values of $H_0$ that have contributed to the recent $H_0$ tension problem. We find that these priors have a strong response in these analyses in terms of all the cosmological parameters. In general, our analyses gives much higher values of $H_0$ when considered against equivalent analyses without priors while, by and large, giving lower values of the matter density parameter. We close with a cross-analysis of each of our model, data set and prior combination choices.
Modified gravity theories predict in general a non standard equation for the propagation of gravitational waves. Here we discuss the impact of modified friction and speed of tensor modes on cosmic microwave polarization B modes. We show that the non standard friction term, parametrized by $alpha_{M}$, is degenerate with the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, so that small values of $r$ can be compensated by negative constant values of $alpha_M$. We quantify this degeneracy and its dependence on the epoch at which $alpha_{M}$ is different from the standard, zero, value and on the speed of gravitational waves $c_{T}$. In the particular case of scalar-tensor theories, $alpha_{M}$ is constant and strongly constrained by background and scalar perturbations, $0le alpha_{M}< 0.01$ and the degeneracy with $r$ is removed. In more general cases however such tight bounds are weakened and the B modes can provide useful constraints on early-time modified gravity.
The goal of this short report is to summarise some key results based on our previous works on model independent tests of gravity at large scales in the Universe, their connection with the properties of gravitational waves, and the implications of the recent measurement of the speed of tensors for the phenomenology of general families of gravity models for dark energy.