Extending MGCAMB tests of gravity to nonlinear scales

Abstract

Modified Growth with CAMB (MGCAMB) is a patch for the Einstein-Boltzmann solver CAMB for cosmological tests of gravity. Until now, MGCAMB was limited to scales well-described by linear perturbation theory. In this work, we extend the framework with a phenomenological model that can capture nonlinear corrections in a broad range of modified gravity theories. The extension employs the publicly available halo model reaction code ReACT, developed for modeling the nonlinear corrections to cosmological observables in extensions of the ΛCDM model. The nonlinear extension makes it possible to use a wider range of data from large scale structure surveys, without applying a linear scale cut. We demonstrate that, with the 3×2pt Dark Energy Survey data, we achieve a stronger constraint on the linear phenomenological functions μ and Σ, after marginalzing over the additional nonlinear parameter p1, compared to the case without the nonlinear extension and using a linear cut. The new version of MGCAMB is now forked with CAMB on GitHub allowing for compatibility with future upgrades.