English

CFHTLenS: Testing the Laws of Gravity with Tomographic Weak Lensing and Redshift Space Distortions

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-10-09 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Dark energy may be the first sign of new fundamental physics in the Universe, taking either a physical form or revealing a correction to Einsteinian gravity. Weak gravitational lensing and galaxy peculiar velocities provide complementary probes of General Relativity, and in combination allow us to test modified theories of gravity in a unique way. We perform such an analysis by combining measurements of cosmic shear tomography from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) with the growth of structure from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey and the Six-degree-Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), producing the strongest existing joint constraints on the metric potentials that describe general theories of gravity. For scale-independent modifications to the metric potentials which evolve linearly with the effective dark energy density, we find present-day cosmological deviations in the Newtonian potential and curvature potential from the prediction of General Relativity to be (Delta Psi)/Psi = 0.05 \pm 0.25 and (Delta Phi)/Phi = -0.05 \pm 0.3 respectively (68 per cent CL).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1212.3339,
  title  = {CFHTLenS: Testing the Laws of Gravity with Tomographic Weak Lensing and Redshift Space Distortions},
  author = {Fergus Simpson and Catherine Heymans and David Parkinson and Chris Blake and Martin Kilbinger and Jonathan Benjamin and Thomas Erben and Hendrik Hildebrandt and Henk Hoekstra and Thomas D. Kitching and Yannick Mellier and Lance Miller and Ludovic Van Waerbeke and Jean Coupon and Liping Fu and Joachim Harnois-Déraps and Michael J. Hudson and Konrad Kuijken and Barnaby Rowe and Tim Schrabback and Elisabetta Semboloni and Sanaz Vafaei and Malin Velander},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.3339},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, 13 figures, accepted by MNRAS; v2: Figure 3 corrected, results unchanged