English

Weak lensing by voids in modified lensing potentials

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-09-15 v2

Abstract

We study lensing by voids in Cubic Galileon and Nonlocal gravity cosmologies, which are examples of theories of gravity that modify the lensing potential. We find voids in the dark matter and halo density fields of N-body simulations and compute their lensing signal analytically from the void density profiles, which we show are well fit by a simple analytical formula. In the Cubic Galileon model, the modifications to gravity inside voids are not screened and they approximately double the size of the lensing effects compared to GR. The difference is largely determined by the direct effects of the fifth force on lensing and less so by the modified density profiles. For this model, we also discuss the subtle impact on the force and lensing calculations caused by the screening effects of haloes that exist in and around voids. In the Nonlocal model, the impact of the modified density profiles and the direct modifications to lensing are comparable, but they boost the lensing signal by only 10%\approx 10\%, compared with that of GR. Overall, our results suggest that lensing by voids is a promising tool to test models of gravity that modify lensing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.05809,
  title  = {Weak lensing by voids in modified lensing potentials},
  author = {Alexandre Barreira and Marius Cautun and Baojiu Li and Carlton Baugh and Silvia Pascoli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.05809},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

19 pages, 8 figures. v2 matches the version published in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:38:56.372Z