Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2015-11-13 12:30 to 2015-11-17 11:30 | Next meeting is Friday May 15th, 11:30 am.
We demonstrate a new method to constrain gravity on the largest cosmological scales by combining measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing and the galaxy velocity field. $E_G$ is a statistic, constructed from a gravitational lensing tracer and a measure of velocities such as redshift-space distortions (RSD), that can discriminate between gravity models while being independent of clustering bias and $\sigma_8$. While traditionally, the lensing field for $E_G$ has been probed through galaxy lensing, CMB lensing has been proposed as a more robust tracer of the lensing field for $E_G$ at higher redshifts while avoiding intrinsic alignments. We perform the largest-scale measurement of $E_G$ ever, up to 150 Mpc/$h$, by cross-correlating the Planck CMB lensing map with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) CMASS galaxy sample and combining this with our measurement of the CMASS auto-power spectrum and the RSD parameter $\beta$. We report $E_G(z=0.57)=0.243\pm0.060$ (stat) $\pm0.013$ (sys), a measurement in tension with the general relativity prediction at a level of 2.6$\sigma$. Upcoming surveys, which will provide an order-of-magnitude reduction in statistical errors, can significantly constrain alternative gravity models when combined with better control of systematics.
We construct a three-dimensional, fully relativistic numerical model of a universe filled with an inhomogeneous pressureless fluid, starting from initial data that represent a perturbation of the Einstein-de~Sitter model. We then measure the departure of the average expansion rate with respect to this Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker reference model, comparing local quantities to the predictions of linear perturbation theory and of the averaging formalism. We find local deviations from the homogeneous expansion that can be as high as $15\%$ for an initial density contrast of $10^{-2}$. We also study, for the first time, the non-perturbative behavior of the backreaction term ${\cal Q}_{\cal D}$, measuring its sign and scaling during the evolution. We find that this term scales as the second-order perturbative prediction for small values of the initial perturbations, and that it becomes negative with a linearly-growing absolute value for larger perturbation amplitudes. Its magnitude, however, remains very small even for relatively large perturbations.
In dRGT massive gravity, to get the equations of motion, the square root tensor is assumed to be invertible in the variation of the action. However, this condition can not be fulfilled when the reference metric is degenerate. This implies that the resulting equations of motion might be different from the case where the reference metric has full rank. In this paper, by generalizing the Moore-Penrose inverse to the symmetric tensor on Lorentz manifolds, we get the equations of motion of the theory with degenerate reference metric. It is found that the equations of motion are a little bit different from those in the non-degenerate cases. Based on the result of the equations of motion, for the $(2+n)$-dimensional solutions with the symmetry of $n$-dimensional maximally symmetric space, we prove a generalized Birkhoff theorem in the case where the degenerate reference metric has rank $n$, i.e., we show that the solutions must be Schwarzschild-type or Nariai-Bertotti-Robinson-type under the assumptions.