Title: Testing Gravity on Cosmological Scales

 

Speaker: Wenjuan Fang (USTC)

 

Abstract: The accelerating expansion of the Universe imposes one of the most challenging questions for modern physics. Except for a missing dark energy component, modified gravity on large scales is another popular perspective to tackle the puzzle of cosmic acceleration, for our standard theory of gravity, i.e., general relativity, is only stringently tested on astrophysical systems. It is possible that the accelerating expansion is a signature for modified behavior of gravity on scales so large that we were unable to observe before. Probes of cosmic acceleration thus provide a chance to test theories of gravity. I will talk about some typical examples of such modified gravity models and their cosmological probes, including a new probing method we currently develop that uses the morphological properties of the Universe’s large-scale structure.