Relativistic Corrections to the Growth of Structure in Modified Gravity

Abstract

We present a method to introduce relativistic corrections including linear dark energy perturbations in Horndeski theory into Newtonian simulations based on the N-body gauge approach. We assume that standard matter species (cold dark matter, baryons, photons and neutrinos) are only gravitationally-coupled with the scalar field and we then use the fact that one can include modified gravity effects as an effective dark energy fluid in the total energy-momentum tensor. In order to compute the scalar field perturbations, as well as the cosmological background and metric perturbations, we use the Einstein-Boltzmann code \hiclass. As an example, we study the impact of relativistic corrections on the matter power spectrum in k-essence, a subclass of Horndeski theory, including the effects of massless and massive neutrinos. For massive neutrinos with $\sum m_{\nu} = 0.1$ eV, the corrections due to relativistic species (photons, neutrinos and dark energy) can introduce a maximum deviation of approximately $7\%$ to the power spectrum at $k \sim 10^{-3} \ \textrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ at $z=0$, for a scalar field with sound speed $c_{s}^{2}\sim 0.013$ during matter domination epoch. Our formalism makes it possible to test beyond $\Lambda$CDM models probed by upcoming large-scale structure surveys on very large scales.