What can galaxy shapes tell us about physics beyond the standard model?
Oliver H. E. Philcox, Morgane J. König, Stephon Alexander, David N. Spergel
Abstract
The shapes of galaxies trace scalar physics in the late-Universe through the large-scale gravitational potential. Are they also sensitive to higher-spin physics? We present a general study into the observational consequences of vector and tensor modes in the early and late Universe, through the statistics of cosmic shear and its higher-order generalization, flexion. Higher-spin contributions arise from both gravitational lensing and intrinsic alignments, and we give the leading-order correlators for each (some of which have been previously derived), in addition to their flat-sky limits. In particular, we find nontrivial sourcing of shear $EB$ and $BB$ spectra, depending on the parity properties of the source. We consider two sources of vector and tensor modes: scale-invariant primordial fluctuations and cosmic strings, forecasting the detectability of each for upcoming surveys. Shear is found to be a powerful probe of cosmic strings, primarily through the continual sourcing of vector modes; flexion adds little to the constraining power except on very small scales ($\ensuremath{\ell}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}1000$), though it could be an intriguing probe of as-yet-unknown rank-three tensors or halo-scale physics. Such probes could be used to constrain new physics proposed to explain recent pulsar timing array observations.