Solar System Test for Alternative Gravity Theories

Over the past year I've worked with Dr. Biswas and Dr.Brans from Loyola University, on different aspects of General relativity. More recently we have been focusing on particle and photon orbits in Schwarzschild-like metric which is relevant to understand observations such as photon deflection and perihelion precession of Mercury. These observations can be used to test alternative gravity theories, such as f(R) Theories. Such solar system tests have proved extremely useful to constrain alternative theories of gravity, such as f(R) theories that try to solve the dark energy problem. While so far most theorists have focused on the simplest f(R) type of modification of gravity to realize the phase of late time cosmic speed-up that we are observing, there are several other viable candidates. In particular, many ``effective'' approaches to gravity gives rise to f(R,G) type of modifications, where G is the Gauss Bonnet term. Accordingly, we are currently trying to understand how solar system tests can constrain this more general class of f(R,G) dark energy models. In my talk I will present our progress in this direction.