A general framework to test gravity using galaxy clusters III: Observable-mass scaling relations in $f(R)$ gravity

TL;DR

This paper develops and tests methods to correct galaxy cluster observable-mass relations in $f(R)$ gravity, enabling accurate gravity tests with SZ and X-ray data, validated through advanced cosmological simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new correction method for $f(R)$ gravity effects on cluster scaling relations and confirms the effectiveness of an analytical mass ratio formula across different simulation models.

Findings

Rescaling methods achieve high accuracy for temperature and SZ observables.

The tanh formula accurately maps $f(R)$ to $ m ext{ extLambda CDM}$ scaling relations.

The proposed methods enable unbiased gravity tests with upcoming galaxy cluster surveys.

Abstract

We test two methods, including one that is newly proposed in this work, for correcting for the effects of chameleon $f(R)$ gravity on the scaling relations between the galaxy cluster mass and four observable proxies. Using the first suite of cosmological simulations that simultaneously incorporate both full physics of galaxy formation and Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ gravity, we find that these rescaling methods work with a very high accuracy for the gas temperature, the Compton $Y$-parameter of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect and the X-ray analogue of the $Y$-parameter. This allows the scaling relations in $f(R)$ gravity to be mapped to their $\Lambda$CDM counterparts to within a few percent. We confirm that a simple analytical tanh formula for the ratio between the dynamical and true masses of haloes in chameleon $f(R)$ gravity, proposed and calibrated using dark-matter-only simulations in a previous work, works equally well for haloes identified in simulations with two very different -- full-physics and non-radiative -- baryonic models. The mappings of scaling relations can be computed using this tanh formula, which depends on the halo mass, redshift and size of the background scalar field, also at a very good accuracy. Our results can be used for accurate determination of the cluster mass using SZ and X-ray observables, and will form part of a general framework for unbiased and self-consistent tests of gravity using data from present and upcoming galaxy cluster surveys. We also propose an alternative test of gravity, using the $Y_{\rm X}$-temperature relation, which does not involve mass calibration.