Testing Gravity with Cosmic Shear Data from the Deep Lens Survey

The current 'standard model' of cosmology provides a minimal theoretical framework that can explain the gaussian, nearly scale-invariant density perturbations observed in the CMB to the late time clustering of galaxies. However accepting this framework, requires that we include within our cosmic inventory a vacuum energy that is ~122 orders of magnitude lower than Quantum Mechanical predictions, or alternatively a new scalar field (dark energy) that has negative pressure. An alternative approach to adding extra components to the Universe would be to modify the equations of Gravity. Although GR is supported by many current observations there are still alternative models that can be considered. Recently there have been many works attempting to test for modified gravity using the large scale clustering of galaxies, ISW, cluster abundance, RSD, 21cm observations, and weak lensing. In this work, we compare various modified gravity models using cosmic shear data from the Deep Lens Survey as well as data from CMB, SNe Ia, and BAO. We use the Bayesian Evidence to quantify the comparison robustly, which naturally penalizes complex models with weak data support. In this talk we present our methodology and preliminary results that show f(R) gravity is mildly disfavoured by the data.