Alternatives to general relativity

Alternatives to general relativity are physical theories that attempt to describe the phenomenon of gravitation in competition with Einstein's theory of general relativity. There have been many different attempts at constructing an ideal theory of gravity. These attempts can be split into four broad categories based on their scope. In this article, straightforward alternatives to general relativity are discussed, which do not involve quantum mechanics or force unification. Other theories which do attempt to construct a theory using the principles of quantum mechanics are known as theories of quantized gravity. Thirdly, there are theories which attempt to explain gravity and other forces at the same time; these are known as classical unified field theories. Finally, the most ambitious theories attempt to both put gravity in quantum mechanical terms and unify forces; these are called theories of everything. None of these alternatives to general relativity have gained wide acceptance. General relativity has withstood many tests, remaining consistent with all observations so far. In contrast, many of the early alternatives have been definitively disproven. However, some of the alternative theories of gravity are supported by a minority of physicists, and the topic remains the subject of intense study in theoretical physics. History of gravitational theory At the time it was published in the 17th century, Isaac Newton's theory of gravity was the most accurate theory of gravity. Since then, a number of alternatives were proposed. The theories which predate the formulation of general relativity in 1915 are discussed in history of gravitational theory. General relativity and History of general relativity This theory is what we now call "general relativity" (included here for comparison). Discarding the Minkowski metric entirely, Einstein gets: which can also be written Five days before Einstein presented the last equation above, Hilbert had submitted a paper containing an almost identical equation. See General relativity priority dispute.

Dark matter in galaxy clusters: Parametric strong-lensing approach

Benjamin Emmanuel Nicolas Beauchesne

We present a parametric strong-lensing analysis of three massive galaxy clusters for which Hubble Space Telescope imaging is available, as well as spectroscopy of multiply imaged systems and galaxy cluster members. Our aim is to probe the inner shape of dark matter haloes, in particular the existence of a core. We adopted the following working hypothesis: any group-or cluster-scale dark matter clump introduced in the modelling should be associated with a luminous counterpart. We also adopted some additional well-motivated priors in the analysis, even when this degraded the quality of the fit, quantified using the root mean square between the observed and model-generated images. In particular, in order to alleviate the degeneracy between the smooth underlying component and the galaxy-scale perturbers, we used the results from previous spectroscopic campaigns, which allowed us to fix the mass of the galaxy-scale component. In the unimodal galaxy cluster AS 1063, a core mass model is favoured over a non-core mass model, and this is also the case in the multimodal cluster MACS J0416. In the unimodal cluster MACS J1206, we fail to reproduce the strong-lensing constraints using a parametric approach within the adopted working hypothesis. We then successfully added a mild perturbation in the form of a superposition of B-spline potentials, which allowed us to obtain a decent fit (root mean square = 0.5 ''), and finally find that a core mass model is favoured. Overall, our analysis suggest evidence for core cluster-scale dark matter haloes in these three clusters. These findings may be useful for the interpretation within alternative dark matter scenario, such as self-interacting dark matter. We propose a working hypothesis for parametric strong-lensing modelling in which the quest for the best-fit model is balanced by the quest for presenting a physically motivated mass model, in particular by imposing priors.

EDP SCIENCES S A2022

Dark matter in galaxy clusters: Parametric strong-lensing approach

Benjamin Emmanuel Nicolas Beauchesne

EDP SCIENCES S A2022