General Relativity (GR) has been tested with exquisite precision on relatively small scales. Nevertheless, tests of gravity on ultra-large scales are still in their infancy. Upcoming observations of the large-scale structure will mark substantial progress over their predecessors, thanks to a huge improvement in terms of survey volume and statistical power. The huge amount of data that will soon be available to the community will cover an unprecedented range of scales, from the ultra-large scales up to the highly nonlinear regime of structure formation, opening the door to new tests of gravity on cosmological scales.
GR leaves several distinctive imprints in the distribution of galaxies on large scales, including relativistic effects due to the projection of observations onto our past light cone. On the one hand, neglecting them could mislead the interpretation of the data. On the other hand, if modelled carefully, they have the potential to be a smoking gun to assess the validity of Einstein's theory on cosmological scales.
The topical workshop `General Relativistic Effects in Large-Scale Structure' hosted by the MIAPbP in 2025, aims to bring together the active community of cosmologists interested in exploring GR effects and their potential impact on cosmological observations, and address the various challenges that arise in measuring these effects and effectively exploiting them to test General Relativity.
The workshop will include talks and discussion sessions on the following topics:
- Detectability of relativistic effects with near-future cosmological surveys;
- New tests of gravity from measurements of relativistic effects;
- Degeneracy between relativistic effects and primordial non-Gaussianity;
- Relativistic simulations in cosmology.
