Constraining modified gravity with weak lensing peaks

It is well established that maximizing the information extracted from upcoming and ongoing stage-IV weak-lensing surveys requires higher-order summary statistics that complement the standard two-point statistics. In this work, we focus on weak-lensing peak statistics to test two popular modified gravity models, $f(R)$ and nDGP, using the FORGE and BRIDGE weak-lensing simulations, respectively. From these simulations we measure the peak statistics as a function of both cosmological and modified gravity parameters simultaneously. Our findings indicate that the peak abundance is sensitive to the strength of modified gravity, while the peak two-point correlation function is sensitive to the nature of the screening mechanism in a modified gravity model. We combine these simulated statistics with a Gaussian Process Regression emulator and a Gaussian likelihood to generate stage-IV forecast posterior distributions for the modified gravity models. We demonstrate that, in a systematics-free case, peak statistics can constrain log₁₀(fR0) = -6 to 2% precision, and log₁₀(H₀ rc) = 0.5 to 25% precision. Finally, we find that our weakest models, log₁₀(fR0) < 6.17 and log₁₀(H₀ rc) > 1, can be ruled out at the two sigma level with an area of 300 deg² and 1000 deg², respectively, with the upcoming stage-IV data.