Constraining modified growth patterns with tomographic surveys

Abstract

Viable models of modified gravity designed to produce cosmic acceleration at the current epoch, closely mimic the $\Lambda$CDM model at the level of background cosmology. However, this degeneracy is generically broken at the level of linear perturbations, where the modifications induce a peculiar scale-dependent pattern. A similar pattern is expected in models of coupled dark energy. I present the main results published in Pogosian and Silvestri [1], on the growth of structure in f(R) theories of gravity, and in Zhao et al. [2], on the potential of upcoming and future tomographic surveys to detect departures from the growth of cosmic structure expected within General Relativity with a cosmological constant.