Searching for modified growth patterns with tomographic surveys

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how upcoming tomographic surveys like DES and LSST, combined with CMB and supernova data, can detect deviations from standard gravity in the growth of cosmic structures, focusing on modifications to gravitational parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a forecast methodology using Fisher matrix analysis to assess the sensitivity of future surveys to modified gravity parameters in structure growth.

Findings

DES can place meaningful constraints on modified growth.

LSST will significantly improve constraints over DES.

The combined data can detect deviations from General Relativity.

Abstract

In alternative theories of gravity, designed to produce cosmic acceleration at the current epoch, the growth of large scale structure can be modified. We study the potential of upcoming and future tomographic surveys such as DES and LSST, with the aid of CMB and supernovae data, to detect departures from the growth of cosmic structure expected within General Relativity. We employ parametric forms to quantify the potential time- and scale-dependent variation of the effective gravitational constant, and the differences between the two Newtonian potentials. We then apply the Fisher matrix technique to forecast the errors on the modified growth parameters from galaxy clustering, weak lensing, CMB, and their cross-correlations across multiple photometric redshift bins. We find that even with conservative assumptions about the data, DES will produce non-trivial constraints on modified growth, and that LSST will do significantly better.