Cosmic time slip: Testing gravity on supergalactic scales with strong-lensing time delays
We devise a test of nonlinear departures from general relativity (GR) using time delays in strong gravitational lenses. We use a phenomenological model of gravitational screening as a step discontinuity in the measure of curvature per unit mass at a radius Λ. The resulting slip between two scalar gravitational potentials leads to shifts in the apparent positions and time delays of lensed sources, relative to the GR predictions, of size γ PN – 1. As a proof of principle, we use measurements of two lenses, RXJ1121 – 1231 and B1608 + 656, to constrain deviations from GR to be below |γ PN – 1| ≤ 0.2 × (Λ/100 kpc). Furthermore, these constraints are complementary to other current probes and are the tightest in the range Λ = 10–200 kpc, showing that future measurements of strong-lensing time delays have great promise to seek departures from general relativity on kpc-Mpc scales.