Paper detail

Testing General Relativity with Growth rate measurement from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Baryon Oscillations Spectroscopic Survey galaxies

The measured redshift ($z$) of an astronomical object is a combination of Hubble recession, gravitational redshift and peculiar velocity. The line of sight distance to a galaxy inferred from redshift is affected by the peculiar velocity component of galaxy redshift, which is observed as an anisotropy in the correlation function. This anisotropy allows us to measure the linear growth rate of matter ($fσ_8$). We measure the $fσ_8$ at $z=0.57$ using the CMASS sample from Data Release 11 of Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS III) Baryon Oscillations Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The galaxy sample consists of 690,826 massive galaxies in the redshift range 0.43-0.7 covering 8498 deg$^2$. Here we report the first simultaneous measurement of $fσ_8$ and background cosmological parameters using Convolution Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (CLPT) with Gaussian streaming model (GSRSD). We arrive at a constraint of $fσ_8=0.462\pm0.041$ (9\% accuracy) at effective redshift ($\bar{z}=0.57$) when we include Planck CMB likelihood while marginalizing over all other cosmological parameters. We also measure $bσ_8=1.19\pm0.03$, $H(z=0.57)=89.2\pm3.6$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$ and $D_A(z=0.57)=1401\pm23$ Mpc. Our analysis also improves the constraint on $Ω_c h^2=0.1196\pm0.0009$ by a factor of 3 when compared to the Planck only measurement($Ω_c h^2=0.1196 \pm 0.0031$). Our results are consistent with Planck $Λ$CDM-GR prediction and all other CMASS measurements, even though our theoretical models are fairly different. This consistency suggests that measurement of $fσ_8$ from Redshift space distortions at multiple redshifts will be a sensitive probe of the theory of gravity that is largely model independent, allowing us to place model-independent constraints on alternative models of gravity.