Testing General Relativity at Cosmological Scales: Implementation and Parameter Correlations

TL;DR

This paper develops a new hybrid parametrization approach for testing general relativity at cosmological scales, implementing it in a software package, and analyzing correlations between modified gravity parameters and cosmological parameters using recent data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid approach for evolving modified gravity parameters in redshift and scale, and provides an open-source implementation for testing general relativity with cosmological data.

Findings

Modified gravity parameters are significantly correlated with _8 and mildly with _m.

Degeneracies between _8 and modified gravity are substantial, affecting future data analyses.

The hybrid parametrization effectively avoids jumps in the matter power spectrum.

Abstract

The testing of general relativity at cosmological scales has become a possible and timely endeavor that is not only motivated by the pressing question of cosmic acceleration but also by the proposals of some extensions to general relativity that would manifest themselves at large scales of distance. We analyze here correlations between modified gravity growth parameters and some core cosmological parameters using the latest cosmological data sets including the refined Cosmic Evolution Survey 3D weak lensing. We provide parametrized modified growth equations and their evolution. We implement known functional and binning approaches, and propose a new hybrid approach to evolve modified gravity parameters in redshift (time) and scale. The hybrid parametrization combines a binned redshift dependence and a smooth evolution in scale avoiding a jump in the matter power spectrum. The formalism developed to test the consistency of current and future data with general relativity is implemented in a package that we make publicly available and call ISiTGR (Integrated Software in Testing General Relativity), an integrated set of modified modules for the publicly available packages CosmoMC and CAMB, including a modified version of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe-galaxy cross correlation module of Ho et al and a new weak-lensing likelihood module for the refined HST-COSMOS weak lensing tomography data. We obtain parameter constraints and correlation coefficients finding that modified gravity parameters are significantly correlated with \sigma_8 and mildly correlated with \Omega_m, for all evolution methods. The degeneracies between \sigma_8 and modified gravity parameters are found to be substantial for the functional form and also for some specific bins in the hybrid and binned methods indicating that these degeneracies will need to be taken into consideration when using future high precision data.