Testing Hu-Sawicki f(R) gravity with the Effective Field Theory approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to map the Hu-Sawicki f(R) gravity model into the effective field theory framework, enabling efficient comparison with cosmological observations and revealing scale-dependent signatures in structure growth.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to translate the Hu-Sawicki f(R) model into EFT language and interface with EFTCAMB for detailed perturbation analysis.

Findings

WiggleZ data favor a non-zero Hu-Sawicki parameter.

CFHTLenS data constrain the model close to ΛCDM.

The model predicts scale-dependent growth of cosmic structures.

Abstract

We show how to fully map a specific model of modified gravity into the Einstein-Boltzmann solver EFTCAMB. This approach consists in few steps and allows to obtain the cosmological phenomenology of a model with minimal effort. We discuss all these steps, from the solution of the dynamical equations for the cosmological background of the model to the use of the mapping relations to cast the model into the effective field theory language and use the latter to solve for perturbations. We choose the Hu-Sawicki f(R) model of gravity as our working example. After solving the background and performing the mapping, we interface the algorithm with EFTCAMB and take advantage of the effective field theory framework to integrate the full dynamics of linear perturbations, returning all quantities needed to accurately compare the model with observations. We discuss some observational signatures of this model, focusing on the linear growth of cosmic structures. In particular we present the behavior of $f\sigma_8$ and $E_G$ that, unlike the $\Lambda$CDM scenario, are generally scale dependent in addition to redshift dependent. Finally, we study the observational implications of the model by comparing its cosmological predictions to the Planck 2015 data, including CMB lensing, the WiggleZ galaxy survey and the CFHTLenS weak lensing survey measurements. We find that while WiggleZ data favor a non-vanishing value of the Hu-Sawicki model parameter, $\log_{10}(-f^0_{R})$, and consequently a large value of $\sigma_8$, CFHTLenS drags the estimate of $\log_{10}(-f^0_{R})$ back to the $\Lambda$CDM limit.