Will Multiple Probes of Dark Energy find Modified Gravity?

Abstract

One of the most pressing issues in cosmology is whether general relativity (GR) plus a dark sector is the underlying physical theory or whether a modified gravity model is needed. Upcoming dark energy experiments designed to probe dark energy with multiple methods can address this question by comparing the results of the different methods in constraining dark energy parameters. Disagreement would signal the breakdown of the assumed model (GR plus dark energy). We study the power of this consistency test by projecting constraints in the $w_0-w_a$ plane from the four different techniques of the Dark Energy Survey in the event that the underlying true model is modified gravity. We find that the standard technique of looking for overlap has some shortcomings, and we propose an alternative, more powerful Multi-dimensional Consistency Test. We introduce the methodology for projecting whether a given experiment will be able to use this test to distinguish a modified gravity model from GR.

Sections rearranged for clarity; references added; accepted to PRD; 16 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Observational Probes of Cosmic Acceleration
• Cosmological Tests of Modified Gravity
• The Clustering of Galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Testing Deviations from $\Lambda$ and General Relativity using anisotropic clustering of galaxies
• Origins of weak lensing systematics, and requirements on future instrumentation (or knowledge of instrumentation)
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Cosmology from Galaxy Clusters Detected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
• Constraining the dark energy equation of state with double source plane strong lenses
• Technically natural dark energy from Lorentz breaking
• Extrinsic Sources of Scatter in the Richness-Mass Relation of Galaxy Clusters
• A Prescription for Galaxy Biasing Evolution as a Nuisance Parameter
• Searching for scalar gravitational interactions in current and future cosmological data
• Stacked Weak Lensing Mass Calibration: Estimators, Systematics, and Impact on Cosmological Parameter Constraints
• Likelihood reconstruction method of real-space density and velocity power spectra from a redshift galaxy survey
• Testing model independent modified gravity with future large scale surveys
• Testing a Phenomenologically Extended DGP Model with Upcoming Weak Lensing Surveys
• The Distinguishability of Interacting Dark Energy from Modified Gravity
• An Analytic Formula for the Supercluster Mass Function
• Massive Gravity wrapped in the Cosmic Web
• Testing the Consistence of Gamma Ray Burst Data-set and Supernovae Union2
• Lorentz-covariant quantum transport and the origin of dark energy