New probe of departures from general relativity using Minkowski functionals

The morphological properties of large scale structure of the Universe can be fully described by four Minkowski functionals (MFs), which provide important complementary information to other statistical observables such as the widely used 2-point statistics in configuration and Fourier spaces. In this work, for the first time, we present the differences in the morphology of large scale structure caused by modifications to general relativity (to address the cosmic acceleration problem), by measuring the MFs from N-body simulations of modified gravity and general relativity. We find strong statistical power when using the MFs to constrain modified theories of gravity: with a galaxy survey that has survey volume $\sim 0.125 (h^{-1}$Gpc$)^3$ and galaxy number density $\sim 1 / (h^{-1}$Mpc$)^{3}$, the two normal-branch DGP models and the F5 $f(R)$ model that we simulated can be discriminated from $\Lambda$CDM at a significance level >~ 5$\sigma$ with an individual MF measurement. Therefore, the MF of large scale structure is potentially a powerful probe of gravity, and its application to real data deserves active explorations.