We offer a discussion on the strong field regime predictions of two families of theories that deviate from General Relativity in different aspects: $f(R)$-gravity and Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG). We discuss astrophysical effects in models based upon both matter and vacuum solutions of such theories. In particular, we analize neutron star structure and the constraints on the parameters of the theories introduced by the latest observations. We also review black hole solutions and several astrophysical consequences of them, including accretion disks and jets. Finally, we report on the implications of the detection of various gravitational wave events for these theories.
We introduce The Novel Probes Project, an initiative to advance the field of astrophysical tests of the dark sector by creating a forum that connects observers and theorists. This review focuses on tests of gravity and is intended to be of use primarily to observers, but also to theorists with interest in the development of experimental tests. It is twinned with a separate review on tests of dark matter self-interactions (Adhikari et al., in prep.). Our focus is on astrophysical probes of gravity in the weak-field regime, ranging from stars to quasilinear cosmological scales. These are complem…
Screened modified gravity theories evade the solar system tests that have proved prohibitive for classical alternative gravity theories. In many cases, they do not fit into the PPN formalism. The environmental dependence of the screening has motivated a concerted effort to find new and novel probes of gravity using objects that are well-studied but have hitherto not been used to test gravity. Astrophysical objects---stars, galaxies, clusters---have proved competitive tools for this purpose since they occupy the partially-screened regime between solar system and the Hubble flow. In this article…
The weak lensing of cosmic web filaments is investigated in modified gravity (MOG) and it is demonstrated that the detected galaxies and baryonic gas of order $5-15 \%$ in filaments can with the enhanced value of the strength of gravity agree with the lensing data for filaments without dark matter.
Weyl conformal symmetry can solve the problem the spacetime singularities present in Einstein's gravity. In a recent paper, two of us have found a singularity-free rotating black hole solution in conformal gravity. In addition to the mass $M$ and the spin angular momentum $J$ of the black hole, the new solution has a new parameter, $L$, which here we consider to be proportional to the black hole mass. Since the solution is conformally equivalent to the Kerr metric, photon trajectories are unchanged, while the structure of an accretion disk around a black hole is affected by the value of the pa…
Using a perturbative approach we solve stellar structure equations for low-density (solar-type) stars whose interior is described with a polytropic equation of state in scenarios involving a subset of modified gravity theories. Rather than focusing on particular theories, we consider a model-independent approach in which deviations from General Relativity are effectively described by a single parameter $ξ$. We find that for length scales below those set by stellar General Relativistic radii the modifications introduced by modified gravity can affect the computed values of masses and radii. As …
The missing gravity in galaxies requires dark matter, or alternatively a modification of gravity or inertia. These theoretical possibilities of fundamental importance may be distinguished by the statistical relation between the observed centripetal acceleration of particles in orbital motion and the expected Newtonian acceleration from the observed distribution of baryons in galaxies. Here predictions of cold dark matter halos, modified gravity, and modified inertia are compared and tested by a statistical sample of galaxy rotation curves from the Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curve…
In this paper, we study the accretion process for fluids flowing near a black hole in the context of $f(T)$ teleparallel gravity. Specifically, by performing a dynamical analysis by a Hamiltonian system, we are able to find the sonic points. After that, we consider different isothermal test fluids in order to study the accretion process when they are falling onto the black hole. We found that these flows can be classified according to the equation of state and the black hole features. Results are compared in $f(T)$ and $f(R)$ gravity.
We calculate explicitly the black-hole temperature for the Schwarzschild de-Sitter solution inside massive gravity by defining the Killing-vector in the direction of the Stückelberg function. We then consider the conditions which an observer in massive gravity has to obey in order to agree with the standard results of General Relativity.
Recently, in Phys. Rev. D 98, 084002 (2018), an investigation was carried out on the gravitational radiation from binary systems in conformal gravity and massive conformal gravity. According to the authors of the paper, these two theories differ only by the sign of a parameter in the matter action of a general conformal theory. For a negative parameter the general conformal theory indeed corresponds to conformal gravity. However, here, we argue that for a positive parameter the general conformal theory does not correspond to massive conformal gravity.
We provide a cosmological test of modified gravity with two tensorial degrees of freedom and no extra propagating scalar mode. The theory of gravity we consider admits a cosmological model that is indistinguishable from the $Λ$CDM model at the level of the background evolution. The model has a single modified-gravity parameter $β$, the effect of which can be seen in linear perturbations, though no extra scalar mode is propagating. Using the Boltzmann code modified to incorporate the present model, we derive the constraints $-0.047 < β< -0.028$ at 68$\%$ confidence from Planck CMB data. Since o…
In the recent years, a host of modified gravity models have been proposed as alternatives to the dark energy. A quantum theory of gravity also requires to modify `General Theory of Relativity'. In the present article, we consider five different modified theories of gravity, and compare inflationary parameters with recent data sets released by two Planck collaboration teams. Our analysis reveals that the scalar-tensor theory of gravity is the best alternative.
The study of the dynamics of a two-body system in modified gravity constitutes a more complex problem than in Newtonian gravity. Numerical methods are typically needed to solve the equations of geodesics. Despite the complexity of the problem, the study of a two-body system in $f(R)$ gravity leads to a new exciting perspective hinting the right strategy to adopt in order to probe modified gravity. Our results point out some differences between the {\em semiclassical} (Newtonian) approach, and the {\em relativistic} (geodesic) one thus suggesting that the latter represents the best strategy for…
We model the velocity dispersion of the ultra-diffuse galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 using Newtonian gravity and modified gravity (MOG). The velocity dispersion predicted by MOG is higher than the Newtonian gravity prediction, but it is fully consistent with the observed velocity dispersion that is obtained from the motion of 10 globular clusters.
The modified gravity (MOG) theory is applied to the gravitational wave binary merger GW190814 to demonstrate that the modified Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation for a neutron star can produce a mass $M=2.6 -2.7 M_\odot$, allowing for the binary secondary component to be identified as a heavy neutron star in the hypothesized mass gap $2.5 - 5 M_\odot$.
This paper is a collection of lecture notes on modified gravity. Various modified gravity models formulated within the Riemannian formalism are discussed.
The cosmological phenomenology of gravity is typically studied in two limits: relativistic perturbation theory (on large scales) and Newtonian gravity (required for smaller, non-linear, scales). Traditional approaches to model-independent modified gravity are based on perturbation theory, so do not apply on non-linear scales. Future surveys such as Euclid will produce significant data on both linear and non-linear scales, so a new approach is required to constrain model-independent modified gravity by simultaneously using all of the data from these surveys. We use the higher order equations fr…
In this work, we study the inflationary cosmology in modified gravity theory $f(R, T) = R + 2 λT$ ($λ$ is the modified gravity parameter) with three distinct class of inflation potentials (i) $ϕ^p e^{-αϕ}$, (ii) $(1-ϕ^p)e^{-αϕ}$ and (iii) $\frac{αϕ^2}{1+αϕ^2}$ where $α$, $p$ are the potential parameters. We have derived the Einstein equation, potential slow-roll parameters, the scalar spectral index $n_s$, tensor to scalar ratio $r$, and tensor spectral index $n_T$ in modified gravity theory. We obtain the range of $λ$ using the spectral index constraints in the parameter space of the potentia…
In modified gravity, the one-loop matter power spectrum exhibits an ultraviolet divergence as shown in the framework of the degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor theory. To address this problem, we extend the effective field theory of large scale structure to modified gravity theories. We find that new counterterms appear and renormalize the ultraviolet divergence as a natural consequence of non-linearity in the modified Poisson equation. The renormalized one-loop matter power spectrum is useful to test modified gravity theories by comparing to observations.
Scalar Tensor Vector Gravity(STVG) is a fully covariant Lorentz invariant alternative theory of gravity also called as MOdified Gravity(MOG) which modifies General Relativity(GR) with dynamical massive vector field and scalar fields. In STVG the mass $μ$ of the vector field $ϕ$ and the Universal gravitational constant G enjoys the status of a dynamical field. We use the reconstructed total cluster mass obtained from X-ray observations by XMM-Newton telescope in combination with the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich(SZ) effect observed within Planck all-sky survey to estimate the parameters $ α$ and $μ$ with …
We systematically assess several limiting cases of modified gravity, where particular theoretical or observational conditions hold. This framework includes the well known scalar-tensor gravity and No Slip Gravity and No Run Gravity, and we extend it to three new limits: Only Run, Only Light, and Only Growth Gravities. These limits give simplifications that allow deeper understanding of modified gravity, including demonstration that gravitational effects on light and matter can have opposite signs in their deviation from general relativity. We also show observational predictions for the differe…
Modified gravity theories can introduce modifications to the Poisson equation in the Newtonian limit. As a result, we expect to see interesting features of these modifications inside stellar objects. White dwarf stars are one of the most well studied stars in stellar astrophysics. We explore the effect of modified gravity theories inside white dwarfs. We derive the modified stellar structure equations and solve them to study the mass-radius relationships for various modified gravity theories. We also constrain the parameter space of these theories from observations.
We present modified Gauss-Bonnet gravity without matter in four dimensions which accommodates flat emergent universe (EU) obtained in Einstein's general theory of gravity with a non-linear equation of state. The EU model is interesting which is free from big-bang singularity with other observed features of the universe. It is assumed that the present universe emerged out from a static Einstein universe phase exists in the infinite past. To obtain a flat EU model we reconstructed mimetic modified $f(G)$-gravity ($G$ representing Gauss-Bonnet terms) without matter. The functional form of f(G)-gr…
We use a spherical model and an extended excursion set formalism with drifting diffusive barriers to predict the abundance of cosmic voids in the context of general relativity as well as f(R) and symmetron models of modified gravity. We detect spherical voids from a suite of N-body simulations of these gravity theories and compare the measured void abundance to theory predictions. We find that our model correctly describes the abundance of both dark matter and galaxy voids, providing a better fit than previous proposals in the literature based on static barriers. We use the simulation abundanc…
We present a general parallelized and easy-to-use code to perform numerical simulations of structure formation using the COLA (COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration) method for cosmological models that exhibit scale-dependent growth at the level of first and second order Lagrangian perturbation theory. For modified gravity theories we also include screening using a fast approximate method that covers all the main examples of screening mechanisms in the literature. We test the code by comparing it to full simulations of two popular modified gravity models, namely $f(R)$ gravity and nDGP, and find go…
We consider nonlocal modified Einstein gravity without matter, where nonlocal term has the form $P(R) F(\Box) Q(R)$. For this model, in this paper we give the derivation of the equations of motion in detail. This is not an easy task and presented derivation should be useful to a researcher who wants to investigate nonlocal gravity. Also, we present the second variation of the related Einstein-Hilbert modified action and basics of gravity perturbations.
This paper scrutinises the tenability of a strict conceptual distinction between space(time) and matter via the lens of the debate between modified gravity and dark matter. In particular, we consider Berezhiani and Khoury's novel 'superfluid dark matter theory' (SFDM) as a case study. Two families of criteria for being matter and being spacetime, respectively, are extracted from the literature. Evaluation of the new scalar field postulated by SFDM according to these criteria reveals that it is as much (dark) matter as anything could possibly be, but also$-$below the critical temperature for su…
Standard cosmological data analyses typically constrain simple phenomenological dark-energy parameters, for example the present-day value of the equation of state parameter, $w_0$, and its variation with scale factor, $w_a$. However, results from such an analysis cannot easily indicate the presence of modified gravity. Even if general relativity does not hold, experimental data could still be fit sufficiently well by a phenomenological $w_0w_a$CDM, unmodified-gravity model. Hence, it would be very useful to know if there are generic signatures of modified gravity in standard analyses. Here we …
New Cosmological Solutions in Nonlocal Modified Gravity
考虑了具有$Λ$项的非定域修正引力的宇宙学性质，其中非定域性是$R \mathcal{F}(\Box) R$型的。利用形式为$\Box R = r R +s,$的解析式，我们找到了几个a（t）非奇异的反弹宇宙学解，它们对应于空间曲率参数k的所有三个值。我们还从F（R）理论的角度讨论了这种改进的引力模型。
We systematically review some standard issues and also the latest developments of modified gravity in cosmology, emphasizing on inflation, bouncing cosmology and late-time acceleration era. Particularly, we present the formalism of standard modified gravity theory representatives, like $F(R)$, $F(\mathcal{G})$ and $F(T)$ gravity theories, but also several alternative theoretical proposals which appeared in the literature during the last decade. We emphasize on the formalism developed for these theories and we explain how these theories can be considered as viable descriptions for our Universe.…
We review thermodynamic properties of modified gravity theories such as $F(R)$ gravity and $f(T)$ gravity, where $R$ is the scalar curvature and $T$ is the torsion scalar in teleparallelism. In particular, we explore the equivalence between the equations of motion for modified gravity theories and the Clausius relation in thermodynamics. In addition, thermodynamics of the cosmological apparent horizon is investigated in $f(T)$ gravity. We show both equilibrium and non-equilibrium descriptions of thermodynamics. It is demonstrated that the second law of thermodynamics in the universe can be met…
