Weak Lensing Light-Cones in Modified Gravity simulations with and without Massive Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper introduces the DUSTGRAIN-pathfinder simulations combining modified gravity and massive neutrinos to generate weak lensing observables, aiming to help distinguish between models that mimic standard cosmology.

Contribution

The paper presents a new suite of cosmological simulations integrating $f(R)$ gravity and massive neutrinos, with methods for generating weak lensing maps for future observational analysis.

Findings

Simulations successfully produce weak lensing and cluster count observables.

Tomographic weak lensing can potentially break degeneracies between models.

Methodology enables detailed study of modified gravity and neutrino effects.

Abstract

We present a novel suite of cosmological N-body simulations called the DUSTGRAIN-pathfinder, implementing simultaneously the effects of an extension to General Relativity in the form of $f(R)$ gravity and of a non-negligible fraction of massive neutrinos. We describe the generation of simulated weak lensing and cluster counts observables within a past light-cone extracted from these simulations. The simulations have been performed by means of a combination of the MG-GADGET code and a particle-based implementation of massive neutrinos, while the light-cones have been generated using the MapSim pipeline allowing us to compute weak lensing maps through a ray-tracing algorithm for different values of the source plane redshift. The mock observables extracted from our simulations will be employed for a series of papers focussed on understanding and possibly breaking the well-known observational degeneracy between $f(R)$ gravity and massive neutrinos, i.e. the fact that some specific combinations of the characteristic parameters for these two phenomena (the $f_{R0}$ scalar amplitude and the total neutrino mass $\Sigma m_{\nu}$) may result indistinguishable from the standard $\mathrm{\Lambda CDM}$ cosmology through several standard observational probes. In particular, in the present work we show how a tomographic approach to weak lensing statistics could allow - especially for the next generation of wide-field surveys - to disentangle some of the models that appear statistically indistinguishable through standard single-redshift weak lensing probe.