Phenomenological tests of modified gravityTools Avilez, Ana A. (2015) Phenomenological tests of modified gravity. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThe main goal of this thesis is to test the viability of some modified theories of gravity suitable to describe gravitational phenomena at cosmological and astronomical scales. In the first part of the Thesis we study the viability of the Brans-Dicke theory (BDT) and the effective scalar-tensor theory according (gBDT) to cosmological observations. We assume that either BDT as gBDT are limiting cases on very large scales of more general scalar-tensor theories involving derivative self-interactions which have running Newton’s constant. In order to implement this assumption in a simple way we consider two types of models. The restricted models that correspond to the standard BDT with Newton constant today equal to measured Newton constant in solar-system experiments. The unrestricted models, correspond to the case where the Newton’s constant today is a free parameter, and the cosmological GN is allowed to be different than in the solar system as in more general theories. We first explore the relevant theoretical aspects of these models. Afterwards, by using different analysis techniques we fitted cosmological observations. Finally we forecast limits of BDT by considering estimated covariance matrices for measurements of the matter power spectrum in redshift space from Euclid. The effective scalar-tensor theory gBDT arises from a phenomenological setup of parametrization of the LSS growth equations, we found estimates of modifications of the growth by using the correspondance between the estimates for the gBDT parameters.
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