| 1. |
- Alsing, Justin, et al.
(författare)
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SPECULATOR : Emulating Stellar Population Synthesis for Fast and Accurate Galaxy Spectra and Photometry
- 2020
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Ingår i: Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0067-0049 .- 1538-4365. ; 249:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We presentspeculator-a fast, accurate, and flexible framework for emulating stellar population synthesis (SPS) models for predicting galaxy spectra and photometry. For emulating spectra, we use a principal component analysis to construct a set of basis functions and neural networks to learn the basis coefficients as a function of the SPS model parameters. For photometry, we parameterize the magnitudes (for the filters of interest) as a function of SPS parameters by a neural network. The resulting emulators are able to predict spectra and photometry under both simple and complicated SPS model parameterizations to percent-level accuracy, giving a factor of 10(3)-10(4)speedup over direct SPS computation. They have readily computable derivatives, making them amenable to gradient-based inference and optimization methods. The emulators are also straightforward to call from a GPU, giving an additional order of magnitude speedup. Rapid SPS computations delivered by emulation offers a massive reduction in the computational resources required to infer the physical properties of galaxies from observed spectra or photometry and simulate galaxy populations under SPS models, while maintaining the accuracy required for a range of applications.
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| 2. |
- Alves, Catarina S., et al.
(författare)
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Impact of Rubin Observatory Cadence Choices on Supernovae Photometric Classification
- 2023
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Ingår i: Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0067-0049 .- 1538-4365. ; 265:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will discover an unprecedented number of supernovae (SNe), making spectroscopic classification for all the events infeasible. LSST will thus rely on photometric classification, whose accuracy depends on the not-yet-finalized LSST observing strategy. In this work, we analyze the impact of cadence choices on classification performance using simulated multiband light curves. First, we simulate SNe with an LSST baseline cadence, a nonrolling cadence, and a presto-color cadence, which observes each sky location three times per night instead of twice. Each simulated data set includes a spectroscopically confirmed training set, which we augment to be representative of the test set as part of the classification pipeline. Then we use the photometric transient classification library snmachine to build classifiers. We find that the active region of the rolling cadence used in the baseline observing strategy yields a 25% improvement in classification performance relative to the background region. This improvement in performance in the actively rolling region is also associated with an increase of up to a factor of 2.7 in the number of cosmologically useful Type Ia SNe relative to the background region. However, adding a third visit per night as implemented in presto-color degrades classification performance due to more irregularly sampled light curves. Overall, our results establish desiderata on the observing cadence related to classification of full SNe light curves, which in turn impacts photometric SNe cosmology with LSST.
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| 3. |
- Bird, Simeon, et al.
(författare)
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An emulator for the Lyman-alpha forest
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. - : IOP Publishing. - 1475-7516. ; :2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present methods for interpolating between the 1-D flux power spectrum of the Lyman-alpha forest, as output by cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. Interpolation is necessary for cosmological parameter estimation due to the limited number of simulations possible. We construct an emulator for the Lyman-alpha forest flux power spectrum from 21 small simulations using Latin hypercube sampling and Gaussian process interpolation. We show that this emulator has a typical accuracy of 1 : 5% and a worst-case accuracy of 4%, which compares well to the current statistical error of 3-5% at z < 3 from BOSS DR9. We compare to the previous state of the art, quadratic polynomial interpolation. The Latin hypercube samples the entire volume of parameter space, while quadratic polynomial emulation samples only lower-dimensional subspaces. The Gaussian process provides an estimate of the emulation error and we show using test simulations that this estimate is reasonable. We construct a likelihood function and use it to show that the posterior constraints generated using the emulator are unbiased. We show that our Gaussian process emulator has lower emulation error than quadratic polynomial interpolation and thus produces tighter posterior confidence intervals, which will be essential for future Lyman-alpha surveys such as DESI.
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| 4. |
- Braden, Jonathan, et al.
(författare)
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Constraining cosmological ultralarge scale structure using numerical relativity
- 2017
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Ingår i: Physical Review D. - 2470-0010 .- 2470-0029. ; 96:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, can give rise to large amplitude ultralarge scale inhomogeneities on distance scales comparable to or larger than the observable universe. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy on the largest angular scales is sensitive to such inhomogeneities and can be used to constrain the presence of ultralarge scale structure (ULSS). We numerically evolve nonlinear inhomogeneities present at the beginning of inflation in full general relativity to assess the CMB quadrupole constraint on the amplitude of the initial fluctuations and the size of the observable universe relative to a length scale characterizing the ULSS. To obtain a statistically meaningful ensemble of simulations, we adopt a toy model in which inhomogeneities are injected along a preferred direction. We compute the likelihood function for the CMB quadrupole including both ULSS and the standard quantum fluctuations produced during inflation. We compute the posterior given the observed CMB quadrupole, finding that when including gravitational nonlinearities, ULSS curvature perturbations of order unity are allowed by the data, even on length scales not too much larger than the size of the observable universe. To demonstrate the robustness of our conclusions, we also explore a semianalytic model for the ULSS which reproduces our numerical results for the case of planar symmetry, and which can be extended to ULSS with a three-dimensional inhomogeneity structure. Our results illustrate the utility and importance of numerical relativity for constraining early universe cosmology.
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| 5. |
- Braden, Jonathan, et al.
(författare)
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Mass renormalization in lattice simulations of false vacuum decay
- 2023
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Ingår i: Physical Review D. - 2470-0010 .- 2470-0029. ; 107:8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- False vacuum decay, a quantum mechanical first-order phase transition in scalar field theories, is an important phenomenon in early Universe cosmology. Recently, real-time semiclassical techniques based on ensembles of lattice simulations were applied to the problem of false vacuum decay. In this context, or any other lattice simulation, the effective potential experienced by long-wavelength modes is not the same as the bare potential. To make quantitative predictions using the real-time semiclassical techniques, it is therefore necessary to understand the redefinition of model parameters and the corresponding deformation of the vacuum state, as well as stochastic contributions that require modeling of unresolved subgrid modes. In this work, we focus on the former corrections and compute the expected modification of the true and false vacuum effective mass, which manifests as a modified dispersion relationship for linear fluctuations about the vacuum. We compare these theoretical predictions to numerical simulations and find excellent agreement. Motivated by this, we use the effective masses to fix the shape of a parametrized effective potential, and explore the modeling uncertainty associated with nonlinear corrections. We compute the decay rates in both the Euclidean and real-time formalisms, finding qualitative agreement in the dependence on the UV cutoff. These calculations further demonstrate that a quantitative understanding of the rates requires additional corrections.
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| 6. |
- Braden, Jonathan, et al.
(författare)
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Towards the cold atom analog false vacuum
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP). - 1126-6708 .- 1029-8479. ; :7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Analog condensed matter systems present an exciting opportunity to simulate early Universe models in table-top experiments. We consider a recent proposal for an analog condensed matter experiment to simulate the relativistic quantum decay of the false vacuum. In the proposed experiment, two ultra-cold condensates are coupled via a time-varying radio-frequency field. The relative phase of the two condensates in this system is approximately described by a relativistic scalar field with a potential possessing a series of false and true vacuum local minima. If the system is set up in a false vacuum, it would then decay to a true vacuum via quantum mechanical tunnelling. Should such an experiment be realized, it would be possible to answer a number of open questions regarding non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theory and early Universe cosmology. In this paper, we illustrate a possible obstruction: the time-varying coupling that is invoked to create a false vacuum for the long-wavelength modes of the condensate leads to a destabilization of shorter wavelength modes within the system via parametric resonance. We focus on an idealized setup in which the two condensates have identical properties and identical background densities. Describing the system by the coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPE), we use the machinery of Floquet theory to perform a linear stability analysis, calculating the wavenumber associated with the first instability band for a variety of experimental parameters. However, we demonstrate that, by tuning the frequency of the time-varying coupling, it may be possible to push the first instability band outside the validity of the GPE, where dissipative effects are expected to damp any instabilities. This provides a viable range of experimental parameters to perform analog experiments of false vacuum decay.
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| 7. |
- Cadiou, Corentin, et al.
(författare)
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Angular momentum evolution can be predicted from cosmological initial conditions
- 2021
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Ingår i: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 502:4, s. 5480-5486
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The angular momentum of dark matter haloes controls their spin magnitude and orientation, which in turn influences the galaxies therein. However, the process by which dark matter haloes acquire angular momentum is not fully understood; in particular, it is unclear whether angular momentum growth is stochastic. To address this question, we extend the genetic modification technique to allow control over the angular momentum of any region in the initial conditions. Using this technique to produce a sequence of modified simulations, we can then investigate whether changes to the angular momentum of a specified region in the evolved universe can be accurately predicted from changes in the initial conditions alone. We find that the angular momentum in regions with modified initial conditions can be predicted between 2 and 4 times more accurately than expected from applying tidal torque theory. This result is masked when analysing the angular momentum of haloes, because particles in the outskirts of haloes dominate the angular momentum budget. We conclude that the angular momentum of Lagrangian patches is highly predictable from the initial conditions, with apparent chaotic behaviour being driven by stochastic changes to the arbitrary boundary defining the halo.
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| 8. |
- Elsner, Franz, et al.
(författare)
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Unbiased pseudo-Cℓ power spectrum estimation with mode projection
- 2017
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Ingår i: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 465:2, s. 1847-1855
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With the steadily improving sensitivity afforded by current and future galaxy surveys, a robust extraction of two-point correlation function measurements may become increasingly hampered by the presence of astrophysical foregrounds or observational systematics. The concept of mode projection has been introduced as a means to remove contaminants for which it is possible to construct a spatialmap, reflecting the expected signal contribution. Owing to its computational efficiency compared to minimum-variance methods, the sub-optimal pseudo-C-l (PCL) power spectrum estimator is a popular tool for the analysis of high-resolution data sets. Here, we integrate mode projection into the framework of PCL power spectrum estimation. In contrast to results obtained with optimal estimators, we show that the uncorrected projection of template maps leads to biased power spectra. Based on analytical calculations, we find exact closed-form expressions for the expectation value of the bias and demonstrate that they can be recast in a form which allows a numerically efficient evaluation, preserving the favourable O(l(max)(3)) time complexity of PCL estimator algorithms. Using simulated data sets, we assess the scaling of the bias with various analysis parameters and demonstrate that it can be reliably removed. We conclude that in combination with mode projection, PCL estimators allow for a fast and robust computation of power spectra in the presence of systematic effects - properties in high demand for the analysis of ongoing and future large-scale structure surveys.
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| 9. |
- Feeney, Stephen M., et al.
(författare)
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Cosmic microwave background science at commercial airline altitudes
- 2017
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Ingår i: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966 .- 1745-3925 .- 1745-3933. ; 469:1, s. l6-L10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Obtaining high-sensitivity measurements of degree-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization is the most direct path to detecting primordial gravitational waves. Robustly recovering any primordial signal from the dominant foreground emission will require high-fidelity observations at multiple frequencies, with excellent control of systematics. We explore the potential for a new platform for CMB observations, the Airlander 10 hybrid air vehicle, to perform this task. We show that the Airlander 10 platform, operating at commercial airline altitudes, is well suited to mapping frequencies above 220 GHz, which are critical for cleaning CMB maps of dust emission. Optimizing the distribution of detectors across frequencies, we forecast the ability of Airlander 10 to clean foregrounds of varying complexity as a function of altitude, demonstrating its complementarity with both existing (Planck) and ongoing (C-BASS) foreground observations. This novel platform could play a key role in defining our ultimate view of the polarized microwave sky.
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| 10. |
- Feeney, Stephen M., et al.
(författare)
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Prospects for Measuring the Hubble Constant with Neutron-Star-Black-Hole Mergers
- 2021
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Ingår i: Physical Review Letters. - 0031-9007 .- 1079-7114. ; 126:17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Gravitational wave (GW) and electromagnetic (EM) observations of neutron-star-black-hole (NSBH) mergers can provide precise local measurements of the Hubble constant (H-0), ideal for resolving the current H-0 tension. We perform end-to-end analyses of realistic populations of simulated NSBHs, incorporating both GW and EM selection for the first time. We show that NSBHs could achieve unbiased 1.5%-2.4% precision H-0 estimates by 2030. The achievable precision is strongly affected by the details of spin precession and tidal disruption, highlighting the need for improved modeling of NSBH mergers.
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