English

Cosmological gravity on all scales V: MCMC forecasts combining large scale structure and CMB lensing for binned phenomenological modified gravity

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-04-14 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

As cosmology rapidly approaches the data-dominated phase of stage IV large scale structure surveys, the modelling of nonlinear scales has become a serious challenge that faces the community, particularly when analysing models beyond wwCDM. In this work, we emulate the matter power spectrum in a phenomenological parameterisation of modified gravity in which a time-varying effective gravitational constant μ\mu and a gravitational slip η\eta are binned in redshift. We are able to achieve accuracy <1%<1\% in the modified gravity boost relative to COLA (COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration) simulations. We forecast the constraining power for each bin using a simulated 3×23\times 2pt LSST Y10-like data vector and a 6×26\times 2pt LSST Y10 x Simons Observatory cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing data vector. We recover the characteristic degeneracy between μ\mu and η\eta previously identified in Fisher forecasts and demonstrate that the best-constrained direction corresponds to the combination Σ=μ(1+η)/2\Sigma=\mu(1+\eta)/2 which governs the lensing potential. We show that while large scale structure is sensitive to growth of structure at low redshift, CMB lensing extends the sensitivity to a higher redshift range. These results demonstrate that fast emulation of nonlinear modified-gravity effects enables full Bayesian analyses of model-agnostic gravity parameterisations with realistic survey data vectors and astrophysical systematics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.11895,
  title  = {Cosmological gravity on all scales V: MCMC forecasts combining large scale structure and CMB lensing for binned phenomenological modified gravity},
  author = {Sankarshana Srinivasan and Shreya Prabhu and Kai Lehman and Ajiv Krishnan V. and Jochen Weller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.11895},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 8 figures. Comments Welcome!