arXiv subjects

Guilherme Brando

Publications and source records attributed to Guilherme Brando.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Biased tracers, Hybrid Effective Field Theory and Modified Gravity

The modelling of the power spectrum of biased tracers has become a central topic in the analysis of modern cosmological galaxy surveys. Perturbative templates formulated in both Eulerian and Lagrangian frameworks have been extensively developed over the last decades, with their implementation in $Λ$CDM thoroughly investigated and validated. In parallel, approaches combining perturbation theory with the output of dark-matter-only simulations have emerged as powerful tools for modelling the nonlinear regime, most notably the Hybrid Effective Field Theory (HEFT) framework~\cite{Modi:2019qbt}. In this work, we discuss the perturbative biased expansion within the local Lagrangian bias scheme and its implementation in the HEFT framework for modified gravity cosmologies. We focus on $f(R)$ gravity, a theory characterized by scale-dependent growth and chameleon screening, making it one of the most challenging scenarios for the computation of Lagrangian Perturbation Theory growth functions and for the generation of accurate numerical simulations. We present a detailed overview of the ingredients required to compute loop-corrected biased power spectra analytically and compare these predictions against fully non-perturbative simulation results. Finally, we propose a strategy to extend existing HEFT-based $Λ$CDM emulators, such as \texttt{bacco} and \texttt{Aemulus}, to beyond-$Λ$CDM cosmologies.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

The sound of dynamical dark energy and modified gravity

Different candidate models are able to reproduce the dynamical dark energy signal preferred by combinations of recent distance measurements. These models may be distinguished by the behavior of their perturbations, which are controlled by the effective sound speed $c_s^2(k,a)$. To explore correlations between the dark energy sound speed and perturbative behavior, we test modified gravity (MG) scenarios in which the dark energy equation of state and sound speed determine modifications to the clustering of matter. We investigate the impact of varying the dark energy sound speed on several cosmological quantities in both General Relativity (GR) and MG. We constrain the dark energy and modified gravity parameters using measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from Planck PR4, type Ia supernova luminosity distances (SN) from Pantheon+, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) from DESI DR2, and cosmic shear from DES-Y3. Using the combination of CMB+BAO+SN, we find that, in the MG scenarios, the preference for dynamical dark energy is correlated with deviations from GR over redshifts $z < 2$ at over 95\% confidence level. The significance of these deviations is not degraded when considering a dynamical or superluminal sound speed, but vanishes if we assume a cosmological constant. The inclusion of cosmic shear and CMB lensing data significantly shifts the constraints towards GR. Our framework enables the exploration of modified gravity models using the dark energy sound speed as a physically meaningful free parameter.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

Modeling nonlinear scales for dynamical dark energy cosmologies with COLA

Upcoming galaxy surveys will bring a wealth of information about the clustering of matter, but modeling small-scale structure beyond $Λ$CDM remains computationally challenging. While accurate N-body emulators exist to model the matter power spectrum for $Λ$CDM and some limited extensions, it's unfeasible to generate N-body simulation suites for all candidate models. Motivated by recent hints of an evolving dark energy equation of state, we assess the viability of employing the COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) method to generate simulation suites assuming the $w_0w_a$ dark energy model. We combine COLA simulations with an existing high-precision $Λ$CDM emulator to extend its predictions into new regions of parameter space. We assess the precision of our emulator at the level of the matter power spectrum, finding that our emulator can reproduce the nonlinear boosts from EuclidEmulator2 at less than $2\%$ error. Moreover, we perform an analysis of a simulated cosmic shear survey akin to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) first year of observations, assessing the differences in parameter constraints between our COLA-based emulator and the benchmark emulator. We find our emulator to be in excellent agreement with the benchmark, achieving less than $0.3σ$ shifts in cosmological parameters. We compare our emulator's performance to a commonly used approach: assuming the $Λ$CDM boost can be employed for extended parameter spaces without modification. We find that our emulator yields a significantly smaller $Δχ^2$ distribution, parameter constraint biases, and a more accurate figure of merit compared to this second approach. Our results demonstrate that COLA emulators provide a computationally efficient path forward for modeling nonlinear structure in extended cosmologies, offering a practical alternative to full N-body suites.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Gravitational wave lensing: probing Fuzzy Dark Matter with LISA

Gravitational lensing is a universal phenomenon: it affects both gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic signals travelling through the gravitational field of a massive object. In this work, we explore the prospects of observing lensed GW signals from the mergers of massive black holes, lensed by dark matter halos composed of Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM), which form dense cores known as solitons. We focus on wave optics phenomena, where frequency-dependent signatures can be observed in the weak lensing regime (i.e. single-image). Our results show that lensing diffraction signatures differ for low-mass halos in FDM, and can reveal the presence of a solitonic core. Furthermore, we demonstrate that FDM and cold dark matter profiles can be distinguished in GW signals from binary massive black hole mergers, which will be observed by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission. However, the dense solitonic core does not substantially enhance the detectability of FDM halos at large source-lens offsets, relative to standard cold dark matter. Our analysis confirms FDM halos as a promising signature of dark matter on GW observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Modeling nonlinear scales with COLA: preparing for LSST-Y1

Year 1 results of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will provide tighter constraints on small-scale cosmology, beyond the validity of linear perturbation theory. This heightens the demand for a computationally affordable prescription that can accurately capture nonlinearities in beyond-$Λ$CDM models. The COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) method, a cost-effective \textit{N}-body technique, has been proposed as a viable alternative to high-resolution \textit{N}-body simulations for training emulators of the nonlinear matter power spectrum. In this study, we evaluate this approach by employing COLA emulators to conduct a cosmic shear analysis with LSST-Y1 simulated data across three different nonlinear scale cuts. We use the $w$CDM model, for which the \textsc{EuclidEmulator2} (\textsc{ee2}) exists as a benchmark, having been trained with high-resolution \textit{N}-body simulations. We primarily utilize COLA simulations with mass resolution $M_{\rm part}\approx 8 \times 10^{10} ~h^{-1} M_{\odot}$ and force resolution $\ell_{\rm force}=0.5 ~h^{-1}$Mpc, though we also test refined settings with $M_{\rm part}\approx 1 \times 10^{10} ~h^{-1}M_{\odot}$ and force resolution $\ell_{\rm force}=0.17 ~h^{-1}$Mpc. We find the performance of the COLA emulators is sensitive to the placement of high-resolution \textit{N}-body reference samples inside the prior, which only ensure agreement in their local vicinity. However, the COLA emulators pass stringent criteria in goodness-of-fit and parameter bias throughout the prior, when $Λ$CDM predictions of \textsc{ee2} are computed alongside every COLA emulator prediction, suggesting a promising approach for extended models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Signatures of dark and baryonic structures on weakly lensed gravitational waves

Gravitational lensing offers a powerful tool for exploring the matter distribution in the Universe. Thanks to their low frequencies and phase coherence, gravitational waves (GWs) allow for the observation of novel wave-optics features (WOFs) in lensing, inaccessible to electromagnetic signals. Combined with the existing accurate source models, lensed GWs can be used to infer the properties of gravitational lenses. The prospect is particularly compelling for space-borne detectors, where the high signal-to-noise ratio expected from massive black hole binary mergers allows WOFs to be distinguished deep into the weak lensing regime, drastically increasing the detection probability. Here, we investigate in detail the capacity of the LISA mission to detect WOFs caused by dark matter halos, galaxies and the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) within them. We estimate the total optical depth to be $λ_{\rm tot} \sim 6 \times 10 ^{-3}$ for the loudest binaries of total mass $M_{\rm BBH} \sim 10^6 M_{\odot}$, with the dominant contribution coming from SMBHs. We also find that WOFs in low-mass binaries $M_{\rm BBH} \sim 10^4 M_{\odot}$ are more likely due to the central galaxies. Within our model of gravitational lenses, we predict $\mathcal{O}(0.1)-\mathcal{O}(1)$ weakly-lensed events to be detectable during the 5 years of LISA mission, depending on the source population models. We show that WOFs signatures are very sensitive to the properties of dark-matter halos with $M_{\rm vir}\in (10^6-10^8)M_\odot$: increasing the compactness parameter by $\sim 3$ in that range raises the detection rate by $\sim 26$. Additionally, we show that collective effects from the complex inner halo structure can further enhance detectability. This suggests that lensed GWs in LISA will be an excellent probe of dark-matter theories, baryonic and halo sub-structures.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Matter Power Spectra in Modified Gravity: A Comparative Study of Approximations and $N$-Body Simulations

Testing gravity and the concordance model of cosmology, $Λ$CDM, at large scales is a key goal of this decade's largest galaxy surveys. Here we present a comparative study of dark matter power spectrum predictions from different numerical codes in the context of three popular theories of gravity that induce scale-independent modifications to the linear growth of structure: nDGP, Cubic Galileon and K-mouflage. In particular, we compare the predictions from full $N$-body simulations, two $N$-body codes with approximate time integration schemes, a parametrised modified $N$-body implementation and the analytic halo model reaction approach. We find the modification to the $Λ$CDM spectrum is in $2\%$ agreement for $z\leq1$ and $k\leq 1~h/{\rm Mpc}$ over all gravitational models and codes, in accordance with many previous studies, indicating these modelling approaches are robust enough to be used in forthcoming survey analyses under appropriate scale cuts. We further make public the new code implementations presented, specifically the halo model reaction K-mouflage implementation and the relativistic Cubic Galileon implementation.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2023

Revisiting Vainshtein Screening for fast N-body simulations

We revisit a method to incorporate the Vainshtein screening mechanism in N-body simulations proposed by R. Scoccimarro in~\cite{Scoccimarro:2009eu}. We further extend this method to cover a subset of Horndeski theories that evade the bound on the speed of gravitational waves set by the binary neutron star merger GW170817. The procedure consists of the computation of an effective gravitational coupling that is time and scale dependent, $G_{\rm eff}\left(k,z\right)$, where the scale dependence will incorporate the screening of the fifth-force. This is a fast procedure that when contrasted to the alternative of solving the full equation of motion for the scalar field inside N-body codes, reduces considerably the computational time and complexity required to run simulations. To test the validity of this approach in the non-linear regime, we have implemented it in a COmoving Lagrangian Approximation (COLA) N-body code, and ran simulations for two gravity models that have full N-body simulation outputs available in the literature, nDGP and Cubic Galileon. We validate the combination of the COLA method with this implementation of the Vainshtein mechanism with full N-body simulations for predicting the boost function: the ratio between the modified gravity non-linear matter power spectrum and its General Relativity counterpart. This quantity is of great importance for building emulators in beyond-$Λ$CDM models, and we find that the method described in this work has an agreement of below $2\%$ for scales down to $k \approx 3h/$Mpc with respect to full N-body simulations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Enabling matter power spectrum emulation in beyond-$Λ$CDM cosmologies with COLA

We compare and validate COLA (COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration) simulations against existing emulators in the literature, namely Bacco and Euclid Emulator 2. Our analysis focuses on the non-linear response function, i.e., the ratio between the non-linear dark matter power spectrum in a given cosmology with respect to a pre-defined reference cosmology, which is chosen to be the Euclid Emulator 2 reference cosmology in this paper. We vary three cosmological parameters, the total matter density, the amplitude of the primordial scalar perturbations and the spectral index. By comparing the COLA non-linear response function with those computed from each emulator in the redshift range $0 \leq z \leq 3$, we find that the COLA method is in excellent agreement with the two emulators for scales up to $k \sim 1 \ h$/Mpc as long as the deviations of the matter power spectrum from the reference cosmology are not too large. We validate the implementation of massive neutrinos in our COLA simulations by varying the sum of neutrino masses to three different values, $0.0$ eV, $0.058$ eV and $0.15$ eV. We show that all three non-linear prescriptions used in this work agree at the $1\%$ level at $k \leq 1 \ h$/Mpc. We then introduce the Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy in our COLA simulations using the $N$-body gauge method. We consider two different modified gravity models in which the growth of structure is enhanced or suppressed at small scales, and show that the response function with respect to the change of modified gravity parameters depends weakly on cosmological parameters in these models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Fully relativistic predictions in Horndeski gravity from standard Newtonian N-body simulations

The N-body gauge allows the introduction of relativistic effects in Newtonian cosmological simulations. Here we extend this framework to general Horndeski gravity theories, and investigate the relativistic effects that the scalar field introduces in the matter power spectrum at intermediate and large scales. In particular, we show that the kineticity function at these scales enhances the amplitude of the signal of contributions coming from the extra degree of freedom. Using the Quasi-Static Approximation (QSA), we separate modified gravity effects into two parts: one that only affects small-scale physics, and one that is due to relativistic effects. This allows our formalism to be readily implemented in modified gravity N-body codes in a straightforward manner, e.g., relativistic effects can be included as an additional linear density field in simulations. We identify the emergence of gravity acoustic oscillations (GAOs) in the matter power spectrum at large scales, $k \sim 10^{-3}-10^{-2}$ Mpc$^{-1}$. GAO features have a purely relativistic origin, coming from the dynamical nature of the scalar field. GAOs may be enhanced to detectable levels by the rapid evolution of the dark energy sound horizon in certain modified gravity models and can be seen as a new test of gravity at scales probed by future galaxy and intensity-mapping surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Relativistic Corrections to the Growth of Structure in Modified Gravity

We present a method to introduce relativistic corrections including linear dark energy perturbations in Horndeski theory into Newtonian simulations based on the N-body gauge approach. We assume that standard matter species (cold dark matter, baryons, photons and neutrinos) are only gravitationally-coupled with the scalar field and we then use the fact that one can include modified gravity effects as an effective dark energy fluid in the total energy-momentum tensor. In order to compute the scalar field perturbations, as well as the cosmological background and metric perturbations, we use the Einstein-Boltzmann code \hiclass. As an example, we study the impact of relativistic corrections on the matter power spectrum in k-essence, a subclass of Horndeski theory, including the effects of massless and massive neutrinos. For massive neutrinos with $\sum m_ν = 0.1$ eV, the corrections due to relativistic species (photons, neutrinos and dark energy) can introduce a maximum deviation of approximately $7\%$ to the power spectrum at $k \sim 10^{-3} \ \textrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ at $z=0$, for a scalar field with sound speed $c_{s}^{2}\sim 0.013$ during matter domination epoch. Our formalism makes it possible to test beyond $Λ$CDM models probed by upcoming large-scale structure surveys on very large scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Exploring Early and Late Cosmology with Next Generation Surveys

Perturbations from inflation evolve into large scale structure of the late universe, and encode abundant cosmic structure formation physics. We allow freedom in the primordial power spectrum, rather than assuming a power law scale dependence, to study its impact on cosmological parameter determination. Combining various generations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and galaxy redshift survey data, we investigate the constraints on reconstruction of the primordial curvature perturbation power spectrum and the late time cosmology, especially the sum of neutrino masses. We quantify how each successive generation, in CMB and galaxy surveys, provides significant improvements, often by factors of several. By using CMB polarization information over a broad range of angular scales, and galaxy redshift data in many bins of redshift, one can allow inflationary freedom and still constrain parameters comparably to assuming power law dependence. The primordial power spectrum can be reconstructed at the subpercent level in a dozen wavenumber bins, while simultaneously fitting the sum of neutrino masses to 14 meV.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

Modified Gravity Away from a $Λ$CDM Background

Within the effective field theory approach to cosmic acceleration, the background expansion can be specified separately from the gravitational modifications. We explore the impact of modified gravity in a background different from a cosmological constant plus cold dark matter ($Λ$CDM) on the stability and cosmological observables, including covariance between gravity and expansion parameters. In No Slip Gravity the more general background allows more gravitational freedom, including both positive and negative Planck mass running. We examine the effects on cosmic structure growth, as well as showing that a viable positive integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect crosscorrelation easily arises from this modified gravity theory. Using current data we constrain parameters with a Monte Carlo analysis, finding a maximum running $|α_M|\lesssim 0.03$. We provide the modified {\tt hi\_class} code publicly on GitHub, now enabling computation and inclusion of the redshift space distortion observable $fσ_8$ as well as the No Slip Gravity modifications.

astro-ph.CO↗