2011/09/30 by R. Ali Vanderveld, Robert R. Caldwell, Jason Rhodes · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #General relativity #Gravitation #Gravitational lens #Gravitational lensing formalism #Mathematics #Physics #Redshift #Scalar (mathematics) #Strong gravitational lensing #Theoretical physics #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.84.123510
published as Phys.Rev.D84:123510,2011 · 13 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor edits to match the PRD accepted version
arxiv created 2011/11/07 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/12 · arxiv updated 2015/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We explore the sensitivity of weak gravitational lensing to second-order corrections to the spacetime metric within a cosmological adaptation of the parametrized post-Newtonian framework. Whereas one might expect nonlinearities of the gravitational field to introduce non-Gaussianity into the statistics of the lensing convergence field, we show that such corrections are actually always small within a broad class of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. We show this by first computing the weak lensing convergence within our parametrized framework to second order in the gravitational potential, and then computing the relevant post-Newtonian parameters for scalar-tensor gravity theories. In doing so we show that this potential systematic factor is generically negligible, thus clearing the way for weak lensing to provide a direct tracer of mass on cosmological scales for a wide class of gravity theories despite uncertainties in the precise nature of the departures from general relativity.