Observable physical modes of modified gravity

At linear order in cosmological perturbations, departures from the growth in the cosmological standard model can be quantified in terms of two functions of redshift $z$ and Fourier number $k$. Previous studies have performed principal component forecasts for several choices of these two functions, based on expected capabilities of upcoming large structure surveys. It is typically found that there will be many well-constrained degrees of freedom. However, not all and, probably most, of these degrees of freedom were physical if the parametrization had allowed for an arbitrary $k$-dependence. In this paper, we restrict the $k$-dependence to that allowed in local theories of gravity under the quasi-static approximation, i.e. ratios of polynomials in $k$, and identify the best constrained features in the ($z$,$k$)-dependence of the commonly considered functions $\mu$ and $\gamma$ as measured by an LSST-like weak lensing survey. We estimate the uncertainty in the measurements of the eigenmodes of modified growth. We find that imposing the theoretical prior on $k$-dependence reduces the number of degrees of freedom and the covariance between parameters. On the other hand, imaging surveys like LSST are not as sensitive to the $z$-dependence as they are to the $k$-dependence of the modified growth functions. This trade off provides us with, more or less, the same number of well-constrained eigenmodes (with respect to our prior) as found before, but now these modes are physical.