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Tuesday, 12 January 2010, 13:30 in P8445A
Prof. Levon Pogosian (SFU)
Cosmological tests of General Relativity - A look at the principals
Future weak lensing surveys will allow us to trace the evolution of galaxy clustering and gravitational potentials through multiple epochs -- the cosmological equivalent of tomography. This will offer an exciting opportunity to test the validity of Einstein equations of General Relativity (GR) which set the relations between the lensing potential, matter inhomogeneities and curvature perturbations. We introduce two arbitrary functions of time and scale that describe a general modification of GR in the linear regime. We then use a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to find the eigenmodes of these functions that surveys like DES and LSST, along with CMB and SN data, will constrain. PCA gives a model-independent forecast of how many parameters describing deviations from GR can be constrained, as well as the redshifts and scales on which data is most sensitive to the departures.
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Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01