Geometric and growth rate tests of General Relativity with recovered linear cosmological perturbations

Understand

I investigate the consistency of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey v7 galaxy sample with the expansion history and linear growth rate predicted by General Relativity (GR) and a Planck (2015) cosmology.

• To do so, I measure the redshift-space power spectrum, which is anisotropic due to both redshift-space distortions (RSD) and the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) effect.
• In Chapter 6, I place constraints of $f \sigma_8(0.76) = 0.44 \pm 0.04$ and $f \sigma_8(1.05) = 0.28 \pm 0.08$, which remain consistent with GR at 95% confidence.
• Marginalising over the anisotropic AP effect degrades the constraints by a factor of three but allows $F_{AP} \equiv (1+z) D_A H/c$ to be simultaneously constrained.