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Modified Einstein versus modified Euler for dark matter

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 1127–1134 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Modifications of general relativity generically contain additional degrees of freedom that can mediate forces between matter particles. One of the common manifestations of a fifth force in alternative gravity theories is a difference between the gravitational potentials felt by relativistic and non-relativistic particles, also known as ‘the gravitational slip’. In contrast, a fifth force between dark matter particles, owing to dark sector interaction, does not cause a gravitational slip, making the latter a possible ‘smoking gun’ of modified gravity. Here we point out that a force acting on dark matter particles, as in models of coupled quintessence, would also manifest itself as a measurement of an effective gravitational slip by cosmological surveys of large-scale structure. This is linked to the fact that redshift-space distortions owing to peculiar motion of galaxies do not provide a measurement of the true gravitational potential if dark matter is affected by a fifth force. Hence, it is extremely challenging to distinguish a dark sector interaction from a modification of gravity with cosmological data alone. Future observations of gravitational redshift from galaxy surveys can help to break the degeneracy between these possibilities, by providing a direct measurement of the distortion of time. We discuss this and other possible ways to resolve this important question.

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Fig. 1: The large-scale and the local Ψ.
Fig. 2: RSD and WL constraints on μ and Σ.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Castello, H. Mirpoorian, A. Silvestri and Z. Wang for useful discussions, and R. Durrer, K. Koyama and M. Kunz for their valuable feedback on the draft of this paper. C.B. acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 863929; project title ‘Testing the law of gravity with novel large-scale structure observables’). L.P. is supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Physique Théorique and Center for Astroparticle Physics, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

    Camille Bonvin

  2. Department of Physics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Levon Pogosian

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  1. Camille Bonvin
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  2. Levon Pogosian
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The authors contributed equally to all aspects of the project and writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Camille Bonvin.

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Bonvin, C., Pogosian, L. Modified Einstein versus modified Euler for dark matter. Nat Astron 7, 1127–1134 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02003-y

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