arXiv subjects

Baojiu Li

Publications and source records attributed to Baojiu Li.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

No evidence for modifications of gravity from galaxy motions on cosmological scales

The recent discovery of gravitational waves marks the culmination of a sequence of successful tests of the general theory of relativity (GR) since its formulation in 1915. Yet these tests remain confined to the scale of stellar systems or the strong gravity regime. A departure from GR on larger, cosmological scales has been advocated by the proponents of modified gravity theories as an alternative to the Cosmological Constant to account for the observed cosmic expansion history. While indistinguishable in these terms by construction, such models on the other hand yield distinct values for the linear growth rate of density perturbations and, as a consequence, for the associated galaxy peculiar velocity field. Measurements of the resulting anisotropy of galaxy clustering, when spectroscopic redshifts are used to derive distances, have thus been proposed as a powerful probe of the validity of GR on cosmological scales. However, despite significant effort in modelling such redshift space distortions, systematic errors remain comparable to current statistical uncertainties. Here, we present the results of a different forward-modelling approach, which fully exploits the sensitivity of the galaxy velocity field to modifications of GR. We use state-of-the-art, high-resolution N-body simulations of a standard GR and a compelling f(R) model, one of GR's simplest variants, to build simulated catalogues of stellar-mass-selected galaxies through a robust match to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey observations. We find that, well within the uncertainty of this technique, f(R) fails to reproduce the observed redshift-space clustering on scales 1-10 Mpc/h. Instead, the standard LCDM GR model agrees impressively well with the data. This result provides a strong confirmation, on cosmological scales, of the robustness of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Nonlinear growth of structure in cosmologies with damped matter fluctuations

We investigate the nonlinear evolution of structure in variants of the standard cosmological model which display damped density fluctuations relative to cold dark matter (e.g. in which cold dark matter is replaced by warm or interacting DM). Using N-body simulations, we address the question of how much information is retained from different scales in the initial linear power spectrum following the nonlinear growth of structure. We run a suite of N-body simulations with different initial linear matter power spectra to show that, once the system undergoes nonlinear evolution, the shape of the linear power spectrum at high wavenumbers does not affect the non-linear power spectrum, while it still matters for the halo mass function. Indeed, we find that linear power spectra which differ from one another only at wavenumbers larger than their half-mode wavenumber give rise to (almost) identical nonlinear power spectra at late times, regardless of the fact that they originate from different models with damped fluctuations. On the other hand, the halo mass function is more sensitive to the form of the linear power spectrum. Exploiting this result, we propose a two parameter model of the transfer function in generic damped scenarios, and show that this parametrisation works as well as the standard three parameter models for the scales on which the linear spectrum is relevant.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Weak lensing by voids in weak lensing maps

Cosmic voids are an important probe of large-scale structure that can constrain cosmological parameters and test cosmological models. We present a new paradigm for void studies: void detection in weak lensing convergence maps. This approach identifies objects that relate directly to our theoretical understanding of voids as underdensities in the total matter field and presents several advantages compared to the customary method of finding voids in the galaxy distribution. We exemplify this approach by identifying voids using the weak lensing peaks as tracers of the large-scale structure. We find self-similarity in the void abundance across a range of peak signal-to-noise selection thresholds. The voids obtained via this approach give a tangential shear signal up to $\sim40$ times larger than voids identified in the galaxy distribution.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Splashback in galaxy clusters as a probe of cosmic expansion and gravity

The splashback radius is a physical scale in dark matter halos that is set by the gravitational dynamics of recently accreted shells. We use analytical models and N-body simulations to study the dependence of splashback on dark energy and screened modified gravity theories. In modified gravity models, the transition from screened to unscreened regions typically occurs in the cluster outskirts, suggesting potentially observable signatures in the splashback feature. We investigate the location of splashback in both chameleon and Vainshtein screened models and find significant differences compared with $Λ$CDM predictions. We also find an interesting interplay between dynamical friction and modified gravity, providing a distinctive signature for modified gravity models in the behavior of the splashback feature as a function of galaxy luminosity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

A new smooth-$k$ space filter approach to calculate halo abundances

We propose a new filter, a smooth-$k$ space filter, to use in the Press-Schechter approach to model the dark matter halo mass function which overcomes shortcomings of other filters. We test this against the mass function measured in N-body simulations. We find that the commonly used sharp-$k$ filter fails to reproduce the behaviour of the halo mass function at low masses measured from simulations of models with a sharp truncation in the linear power spectrum. We show that the predictions with our new filter agree with the simulation results over a wider range of halo masses for both damped and undamped power spectra than is the case with the sharp-$k$ and real-space top-hat filters.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

The Santiago-Harvard-Edinburgh-Durham void comparison I: SHEDding light on chameleon gravity tests

We present a systematic comparison of several existing and new void finding algorithms, focusing on their potential power to test a particular class of modified gravity models - chameleon $f(R)$ gravity. These models deviate from standard General Relativity (GR) more strongly in low-density regions and thus voids are a promising venue to test them. We use Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) prescriptions to populate haloes with galaxies, and tune the HOD parameters such that the galaxy two-point correlation functions are the same in both f(R) and GR models. We identify both 3D voids as well as 2D underdensities in the plane-of-the-sky to find the same void abundance and void galaxy number density profiles across all models, which suggests that they do not contain much information beyond galaxy clustering. However, the underlying void dark matter density profiles are significantly different, with f(R) voids being more underdense than GR ones, which leads to f(R) voids having a larger tangential shear signal than their GR analogues. We investigate the potential of each void finder to test f(R) models with near-future lensing surveys such as EUCLID and LSST. The 2D voids have the largest power to probe f(R) gravity, with a LSST analysis of tunnel (which is a new type of 2D underdensity introduced here) lensing distinguishing at 80 and 11$σ$ (statistical error) f(R) models with $|f_{R0}|=10^{-5}$ and $10^{-6}$ from GR.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

A general framework to test gravity using galaxy clusters I: Modelling the dynamical mass of haloes in $ f(R) $ gravity

We propose a new framework for testing gravity using cluster observations, which aims to provide an unbiased constraint on modified gravity models from Sunyaev Zel'dovich (SZ) and X-ray cluster counts and the cluster gas fraction, among other possible observables. Focusing on a popular $ f(R) $ model of gravity, we propose a novel procedure to recalibrate mass scaling relations from $ Λ$CDM to $ f(R) $ gravity for SZ and X-ray cluster observables. We find that the complicated modified gravity effects can be simply modelled as a dependence on a combination of the background scalar field and redshift, $ f_R(z)/(1+z) $, regardless of the $ f(R) $ model parameter. By employing a large suite of N-body simulations, we demonstrate that a theoretically derived tanh fitting formula is in excellent agreement with the dynamical mass enhancement of dark matter haloes for a large range of background field parameters and redshifts. Our framework is sufficiently flexible to allow for tests of other models and inclusion of further observables. The one-parameter description of the dynamical mass enhancement can have important implications on the theoretical modelling of observables and on practical tests of gravity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Testing modified gravity using a marked correlation function

In theories of modified gravity with the chameleon screening mechanism, the strength of the fifth force depends on environment. This induces an environment dependence of structure formation, which differs from $Λ$CDM. We show that these differences can be captured by the marked correlation function. With the galaxy correlation functions and number densities calibrated to match between $f(R)$ and $Λ$CDM models in simulations, we show that the marked correlation functions from using either the local density or halo mass as the marks encode extra information, which can be used to test these theories. We discuss possible applications of these statistics in observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

New method for initial density reconstruction

A theoretically interesting and practically important question in cosmology is the reconstruction of the initial density distribution provided a late-time density field. This is a long-standing question with a revived interest recently, especially in the context of optimally extracting the baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) signals from observed galaxy distributions. We present a new efficient method to carry out this reconstruction, which is based on numerical solutions to the nonlinear partial differential equation that governs the mapping between the initial Lagrangian and final Eulerian coordinates of particles in evolved density fields. This is motivated by numerical simulations of the quartic Galileon gravity model, which has similar equations that can be solved effectively by multigrid Gauss-Seidel relaxation. The method is based on mass conservation, and does not assume any specific cosmological model. Our test shows that it has a performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art algorithms which were very recently put forward in the literature, with the reconstructed density field over $\sim80\%$ ($50\%$) correlated with the initial condition at $k\lesssim0.6h/{\rm Mpc}$ ($1.0h/{\rm Mpc}$). With an example, we demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the accuracy of BAO reconstruction.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

The Effect of Thermal Velocities on Structure Formation in N-body Simulations of Warm Dark Matter

We investigate the impact of thermal velocities in N-body simulations of structure formation in warm dark matter models. Adopting the commonly used approach of adding thermal velocities, randomly selected from a Fermi-Dirac distribution, to the gravitationally-induced velocities of the simulation particles, we compare the matter and velocity power spectra measured from CDM and WDM simulations, in the latter case with and without thermal velocities. This prescription for adding thermal velocities introduces numerical noise into the initial conditions, which influences structure formation. At early times, the noise affects dramatically the power spectra measured from simulations with thermal velocities, with deviations of the order of $\sim \mathcal{O}(10)$ (in the matter power spectra) and of the order of $\sim \mathcal{O}(10^2)$ (in the velocity power spectra) compared to those extracted from simulations without thermal velocities. At late times, these effects are less pronounced with deviations of less than a few percent. Increasing the resolution of the N-body simulation shifts these discrepancies to higher wavenumbers. We also find that spurious haloes start to appear in simulations which include thermal velocities at a mass that is $\sim$3 times larger than in simulations without thermal velocities.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Galaxy-galaxy weak gravitational lensing in $f(R)$ gravity

We present an analysis of galaxy-galaxy weak gravitational lensing (GGL) in chameleon $f(R)$ gravity - a leading candidate of non-standard gravity models. For the analysis we have created mock galaxy catalogues based on dark matter haloes from two sets of numerical simulations, using a halo occupation distribution (HOD) prescription which allows a redshift dependence of galaxy number density. To make a fairer comparison between the $f(R)$ and $Λ$CDM models, their HOD parameters are tuned so that the galaxy two-point correlation functions in real space (and therefore the projected two-point correlation functions) match. While the $f(R)$ model predicts an enhancement of the convergence power spectrum by up to $\sim30\%$ compared to the standard $Λ$CDM model with the same parameters, the maximum enhancement of GGL is only half as large and less than 5\% on separations above $\sim1$-$2h^{-1}$Mpc, because the latter is a cross correlation of shear (or matter, which is more strongly affected by modified gravity) and galaxy (which is weakly affected given the good match between galaxy auto correlations in the two models) fields. We also study the possibility of reconstructing the matter power spectrum by combination of GGL and galaxy clustering in $f(R)$ gravity. We find that the galaxy-matter cross correlation coefficient remains at unity down to $\sim2$-$3h^{-1}$Mpc at relevant redshifts even in $f(R)$ gravity, indicating joint analysis of GGL and galaxy clustering can be a powerful probe of matter density fluctuations in chameleon gravity. The scale dependence of the model differences in their predictions of GGL can potentially allow to break the degeneracy between $f(R)$ gravity and other cosmological parameters such as $Ω_m$ and $σ_8$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Equivalence of cosmological observables in conformally related scalar tensor theories

Scalar tensor theories can be expressed in different frames, such as the commonly-used Einstein and Jordan frames, and it is generally accepted that cosmological observables are the same in these frames. We revisit this by making a detailed side-by-side comparison of the quantities and equations in two conformally related frames, from the actions and fully covariant field equations to the linearised equations in both real and Fourier spaces. This confirms that the field and conservation equations are equivalent in the two frames, in the sense that we can always re-express equations in one frame using relevant transformations of variables to derive the corresponding equations in the other. We show, with both analytical derivation and a numerical example, that the line-of-sight integration to calculate CMB temperature anisotropies can be done using either Einstein frame or Jordan frame quantities, and the results are identical, provided the correct redshift is used in the Einstein frame ($1+z\neq1/a$).

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

New probe of departures from general relativity using Minkowski functionals

The morphological properties of large scale structure of the Universe can be fully described by four Minkowski functionals (MFs), which provide important complementary information to other statistical observables such as the widely used 2-point statistics in configuration and Fourier spaces. In this work, for the first time, we present the differences in the morphology of large scale structure caused by modifications to general relativity (to address the cosmic acceleration problem), by measuring the MFs from N-body simulations of modified gravity and general relativity. We find strong statistical power when using the MFs to constrain modified theories of gravity: with a galaxy survey that has survey volume $\sim 0.125 (h^{-1}$Gpc$)^3$ and galaxy number density $\sim 1 / (h^{-1}$Mpc$)^{3}$, the two normal-branch DGP models and the F5 $f(R)$ model that we simulated can be discriminated from $Λ$CDM at a significance level >~ 5$σ$ with an individual MF measurement. Therefore, the MF of large scale structure is potentially a powerful probe of gravity, and its application to real data deserves active explorations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

The Effect of Modified Gravity on the Odds of the Bound Violations of the Turn-Around Radii

The turn-around radii of the galaxy groups show the imprint of a long battle between their self-gravitational forces and the accelerating space. The standard $Λ$CDM cosmology based on the general relativity (GR) predicts the existence of an upper bound on the expectation value of the turn-around radius which is rarely violated by individual galaxy groups. We speculate that a deviation of the gravitational law from GR on the cosmological scale could cause an appreciable shift of the mean turn-around radius to higher values and make the occurrence of the bound violation more probable. Analyzing the data from high-resolution N-body simulations for two specific models with modified gravity (MG) and the standard GR+$Λ$CDM cosmology, we determine the turn-around radii of the massive Rockstar groups from the peculiar motions of the galactic halos located in the bound zone where the fifth force generated by MG is expected to be at most partially shielded. We detect a $4σ$ signal of difference in the odds of the bound violations between a fiducial MG and the GR models, proving that the odds of the bound violations increase with the strength of the fifth force produced by the presence of MG. The advantage of using the odds of the bound violations as a complementary diagnostics to probe the nature of gravity is discussed.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Environmental screening of dark matter haloes in $f(R)$ gravity

In certain theories of modified gravity, solar system constraints on deviations from general relativity (GR) are satisfied by virtue of a so-called screening mechanism, which enables the theory to revert to GR in regions where the matter density is high or the gravitational potential is deep. In the case of chameleon theories, the screening has two contributions -- self-screening, which is due to the mass of an object itself, and environmental screening, which is caused by the surrounding matter -- which are often entangled, with the second contribution being more crucial for less massive objects. A quantitative understanding of the effect of the environment on the screening can prove critical in observational tests of such theories using systems such as the Local Group and dwarf galaxies, for which the environment may be inferred in various ways. We use the high-resolution {\sc liminality} simulation of Shi et al. (2015) to test the fidelity of different definitions of environment. We find that, although the different ways to define environment in practice do not agree with one another perfectly, they can provide useful guidance, and cross checks about how well a dark matter halo is screened. In addition, the screening of subhaloes in dark matter haloes is primarily determined by the environment, with the subhalo mass playing a minor role, which means that lower-resolution simulations where subhaloes are not well resolved can still be useful for understanding the modification of gravity inside subhaloes.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Cluster abundance in chameleon $f(R)$ gravity I: toward an accurate halo mass function prediction

We refine the mass and environment dependent spherical collapse model of chameleon $f(R)$ gravity by calibrating a phenomenological correction inspired by the parameterized post-Friedmann framework against high-resolution $N$-body simulations. We employ our method to predict the corresponding modified halo mass function, and provide fitting formulas to calculate the fractional enhancement of the $f(R)$ halo abundance with respect to that of General Relativity (GR) within a precision of $\lesssim 5\%$ from the results obtained in the simulations. Similar accuracy can be achieved for the full $f(R)$ mass function on the condition that the modeling of the reference GR abundance of halos is accurate at the percent level. We use our fits to forecast constraints on the additional scalar degree of freedom of the theory, finding that upper bounds competitive with current Solar System tests are within reach of cluster number count analyses from ongoing and upcoming surveys at much larger scales. Importantly, the flexibility of our method allows also for this to be applied to other scalar-tensor theories characterized by a mass and environment dependent spherical collapse.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Speeding up $N$-body simulations of modified gravity: Chameleon screening models

We describe and demonstrate the potential of a new and very efficient method for simulating certain classes of modified gravity theories, such as the widely studied $f(R)$ gravity models. High resolution simulations for such models are currently very slow due to the highly nonlinear partial differential equation that needs to be solved exactly to predict the modified gravitational force. This nonlinearity is partly inherent, but is also exacerbated by the specific numerical algorithm used, which employs a variable redefinition to prevent numerical instabilities. The standard Newton-Gauss-Seidel iterative method used to tackle this problem has a poor convergence rate. Our new method not only avoids this, but also allows the discretised equation to be written in a form that is analytically solvable. We show that this new method greatly improves the performance and efficiency of $f(R)$ simulations. For example, a test simulation with $512^3$ particles in a box of size $512 \, \mathrm{Mpc}/h$ is now 5 times faster than before, while a Millennium-resolution simulation for $f(R)$ gravity is estimated to be more than 20 times faster than with the old method. Our new implementation will be particularly useful for running very high resolution, large-sized simulations which, to date, are only possible for the standard model, and also makes it feasible to run large numbers of lower resolution simulations for covariance analyses. We hope that the method will bring us to a new era for precision cosmological tests of gravity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Weak lensing by galaxy troughs with modified gravity

We study the imprints that theories of gravity beyond GR can leave on the lensing signal around line of sight directions that are predominantly halo-underdense (called troughs) and halo-overdense. To carry out our investigations, we consider the normal branch of DGP gravity, as well as a phenomenological variant thereof that directly modifies the lensing potential. The predictions of these models are obtained with N-body simulation and ray-tracing methods using the ECOSMOG and Ray-Ramses codes. We analyse the stacked lensing convergence profiles around the underdense and overdense lines of sight, which exhibit, respectively, a suppression and a boost w.r.t. the mean in the field of view. The modifications to gravity in these models strengthen the signal w.r.t. $Λ{\rm CDM}$ in a scale-independent way. We find that the size of this effect is the same for both underdense and overdense lines of sight, which implies that the density field along the overdense directions on the sky is not sufficiently evolved to trigger the suppression effects of the screening mechanism. These results are robust to variations in the minimum halo mass and redshift ranges used to identify the lines of sight, as well as to different line of sight aperture sizes and criteria for their underdensity and overdensity thresholds.

astro-ph.CO↗