Towards Constraining Parity-Violations in Gravity with Satellite Gradiometry

Parity violation in gravity, if existed, could have important implications, and it is meaningful to search and test the possible observational effects. Chern-Simons modified gravity serves as a natural model for gravitational parity-violations. Especially, considering extensions to Einstein-Hilbert action up to second order curvature terms, it is known that theories of gravitational parity-violation will reduce to the dynamical Chern-Simons gravity. In this letter, we outline the theoretical principles of testing the dynamical Chern-Simons gravity with orbiting gravity gradiometers, which could be naturally incorporated into future satellite gravity missions. The secular gravity gradient signals, due to the Mashhoon-Theiss (anomaly) effect, in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity are worked out, which can improve the constraint of the corresponding Chern-Simons length scale $\xi^{\frac{1}{4}}_{cs}$ obtained from such measurement scheme. For orbiting superconducting gradiometers or gradiometers with optical readout, a bound $\xi^{\frac{1}{4}}_{cs}\leq 10^6 \ km$ (or even better) could in principle be obtained, which will be at least 2 orders of magnitude stronger than the current one based on the observations from the GP-B mission and the LAGEOS I, II satellites.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1606.0818

The Flatness of Mass-to-Light Ratio on Large Scales

It has been suggested that the mass-to-light ($M/L$) ratio of gravitationally clustering objects is scale-independent on scales beyond galaxy clusters, and may also be independent of the mass of the objects. In this paper, we show that the scale behavior of $M/L$ ratio is closely related to the scaling of cosmic structures larger than clusters. The scale dependence of the $M/L$ ratio can be determined by comparing the observed scaling of richness function (RF) of multi-scale identified objects with the model-predicted scaling of mass function (MF) of large scale structures. Using the multi-scale identified clusters from IRAS 1.2 Jy galaxy survey, we have made comparisons of the observed RF scaling of IRAS $r_{cl}$-clusters with the MF scalings given by simulations of three popular models SCDM, LCDM and OCDM. We find that, the M/L ratio basically is scale-independent from the Abell radius up to about 24 $h^{-1}$Mpc, while it seems to show a slight, but systematical, increase over this scale range. This result is weakly dependent on the cosmological parameters.Comment: AAS Latex file, 8 pages+ 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ