An evaluation of cosmological models from expansion and growth of structure measurements

Abstract: We compare a large suite of theoretical cosmological models to observational data from the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillation measurements of expansion, Type Ia SNe measurements of expansion, redshift space distortion measurements of the growth of structure, and the local Hubble constant. Our theoretical models include parametrizations of dark energy as well as physical models of dark energy and modified gravity. We determine the constraints on the model parameters, incorporating the redshift space distortion data directly in the analysis. To determine whether models can be ruled out, we evaluate the $p$ value (the probability under the model of obtaining data as bad or worse than the observed data). In our comparison, we find the well known tension of H$_0$ with the other data; no model resolves this tension successfully. Among the models we consider, the large scale growth of structure data does not affect the modified gravity models as a category particularly differently than dark energy models; it matters for some modified gravity models but not others, and the same is true for dark energy models. We compute predicted observables for each model under current observational constraints, and identify models for which future observational constraints will be particularly informative.