Ignacy Sawicki
Conservation of super-horizon tensor fluctuations is crucial for connecting inflation to observations. Starting from first principles, recent works have found violations of this conservation if free-streaming radiation is produced during…
The ability to infer properties of primordial inflation relies on the conservation of the superhorizon perturbations between their exit during inflation, and their re-entry during radiation era. Any considerable departure from this property…
In scalar-tensor theories with derivative interactions, backgrounds spontaneously break local Lorentz invariance. We study the motion of perturbations of the scalar, "phonons", on these anisotropic time-dependent backgrounds in curved…
The regularity of black hole solutions, embedded in an expanding Universe, is studied in a subclass of Horndeski theories, namely the sum of the simplest quadratic, cubic and quintic actions. We find that in presence of a time derivative of…
Static black holes in general relativity modified by a linear scalar coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant always carry hair. We show that the same mechanism that creates the hair makes it incompatible with a cosmological horizon. Other…
Euclid is a European Space Agency medium class mission selected for launch in 2020 within the Cosmic Vision 2015 2025 program. The main goal of Euclid is to understand the origin of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Euclid will…
The N-body gauge allows the introduction of relativistic effects in Newtonian cosmological simulations. Here we extend this framework to general Horndeski gravity theories, and investigate the relativistic effects that the scalar field…
Cosmological datasets have great potential to elucidate the nature of dark energy and test gravity on the largest scales available to observation. Theoretical predictions can be computed with hi_class (www.hiclass-code.net), an accurate,…
The recent discovery of a $\gamma$-ray counterpart to a gravitational wave event has put extremely stringent constraints on the speed of gravitational waves at the present epoch. In turn, these constraints place strong theoretical pressure…
The goal of this short report is to summarise some key results based on our previous works on model independent tests of gravity at large scales in the Universe, their connection with the properties of gravitational waves, and the…
We study the impact on the galaxy correlation function of the presence of a vector component in the tracers' peculiar velocities, in the case in which statistical isotropy is violated. We present a general framework - based on the bipolar…
We use the most recent, complete and independent measurements of masses and radii of white dwarfs in binaries to bound the class of non-trivial modified gravity theories, viable after GW170817/GRB170817, using its effect on the mass-radius…
The coincident detection of gravitational waves (GW) and a gamma-ray burst from a merger of neutron stars has placed an extremely stringent bound on the speed of GW. We showed previously that the presence of gravitational slip ($\eta$) in…
We compute a general expression for the contribution of vector perturbations to the redshift-space distortion of galaxy surveys. We show that they contribute to the same multipoles of the correlation function as scalar perturbations and…
The detection of an electromagnetic counterpart (GRB 170817A) to the gravitational wave signal (GW170817) from the merger of two neutron stars opens a completely new arena for testing theories of gravity. We show that this measurement…
We present the public version of hi_class (www.hiclass-code.net), an extension of the Boltzmann code CLASS to a broad ensemble of modifications to general relativity. In particular, hi_class can calculate predictions for models based on…
In many generalized models of gravity, perfect fluids in cosmology give rise to gravitational slip. Simultaneously, in very broad classes of such models, the propagation of gravitational waves is altered. We investigate the extent to which…
We point out that the observed time delay between the detection of the signal at the Hanford and Livingston LIGO sites from the gravitational wave event GW150914 places an upper bound on the speed of propagation of gravitational waves,…
We use large-scale cosmological observations to place constraints on the dark-matter pressure, sound speed and viscosity, and infer a limit on the mass of warm-dark-matter particles. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
Despite its continued observational successes, there is a persistent (and growing) interest in extending cosmology beyond the standard model, $\Lambda$CDM. This is motivated by a range of apparently serious theoretical issues, involving…