Testing Scale-Dependent Modified Gravity with DESI DR1
Abstract
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) provides an unprecedented opportunity to test deviations from general relativity (GR) that introduce a new physical scale within its redshift range. Using the connection between a Yukawa-like potential and the Hu-Sawicki model, we place strong constraints on the range of a hypothetical fifth force mediated by a massive scalar field. We analyze the power spectrum measurements from DESI Data Release 1 using a baseline EFT model that employs the fkpt approach for the loop integrals. We find no evidence for deviations from GR and obtain the constraint (95\% C.L.). This corresponds to an upper bound at redshift zero on the scale at which corrections to GR become important, Mpc, or equivalently, a lower bound on the mass of the additional gravitational mediator of eV. We find that the modified gravity parameter is largely orthogonal to the cosmological parameters in the model, such that no additional projection effects relative to the GR case are introduced in this Full-Shape analysis. Furthermore, a second modified gravity parameter, the power index , which modulates the time-variation of the associated mass, is found to be consistent with previous analyses that fixed it to unity. Adding DESI BAO data or other cosmological probes does not significantly change these results. The conclusions remain similar if the background evolution is described by evolving dark energy instead of a cosmological constant. Additionally, we test the robustness of the baseline model by varying the maximum wavenumber used in the Full-Shape analysis and analyzing the DESI targets separately. Finally, we analyze the degeneracies between the modified-gravity parameters and the sum of neutrino masses.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.26915,
title = {Testing Scale-Dependent Modified Gravity with DESI DR1},
author = {D. Gonzalez and G. Niz and A. Aviles and C. Garcia-Quintero and H. E. Noriega and J. Aguilar and S. Ahlen and D. Bianchi and D. Brooks and T. Claybaugh and A. de la Macorra and A. de Mattia and P. Doel and S. Ferraro and J. E. Forero-Romero and E. Gaztañaga and S. Gontcho A Gontcho and G. Gutierrez and C. Hahn and K. Honscheid and D. Huterer and M. Ishak and R. Joyce and S. Juneau and R. Kehoe and D. Kirkby and M. Landriau and L. Le Guillou and M. E. Levi and M. Manera and A. Meisner and R. Miquel and S. Nadathur and W. J. Percival and I. Pérez-Ràfols and G. Rossi and L. Samushia and E. Sanchez and D. Schlegel and H. Seo and J. Silber and D. Sprayberry and G. Tarlé and B. A. Weaver and R. Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.26915},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
22 pages + bib, 11 figures