Dr. David Alonso

Abstract:

We derive all contributions to the dispersion measure (DM) of electromagnetic pulses to linear order in cosmological perturbations, including both density fluctuations and relativistic effects. We then use this result to calculate the power spectrum of DM-based cosmological observables to linear order in perturbations. In particular we study two cases: maps of the dispersion measure from a set of localized sources (including the effects of source clustering), and fluctuations in the density of DM-selected sources. The impact of most relativistic effects is limited to large angular scales, and is negligible for all practical applications in the context of ongoing and envisaged observational programmes targetting fast radio bursts. We compare the leading contributions to DM-space clustering, including the effects of gravitational lensing, and find that the signal is dominated by the fluctuations in the free electron column density, rather than the local source clustering or lensing contributions. To compensate for the disappointing irrelevance of relativistic effects, we re-derive them in terms of the geodesic equation for massive particles in a perturbed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric.

Abstract:

<jats:p>We measured the cross-correlation between galaxy weak lensing data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS-1000, DR4) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT, DR4) and the <jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic> Legacy survey. We used two samples of source galaxies, selected with photometric redshifts, (0.1 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 1.2) and (1.2 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 2), which produce a combined detection significance of the CMB lensing and weak galaxy lensing cross-spectrum of 7.7<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>. With the lower redshift galaxy sample, for which the cross-correlation was detected at a significance of 5.3<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>, we present joint cosmological constraints on the matter density parameter, Ω<jats:sub>m</jats:sub>, and the matter fluctuation amplitude parameter, <jats:italic>σ</jats:italic><jats:sub>8</jats:sub>, marginalising over three nuisance parameters that model our uncertainty in the redshift and shear calibration as well as the intrinsic alignment of galaxies. We find our measurement to be consistent with the best-fitting flat ΛCDM cosmological models from both <jats:italic>Planck</jats:italic> and KiDS-1000. We demonstrate the capacity of CMB weak lensing cross-correlations to set constraints on either the redshift or shear calibration by analysing a previously unused high-redshift KiDS galaxy sample (1.2 &lt; <jats:italic>z</jats:italic><jats:sub>B</jats:sub> &lt; 2), with the cross-correlation detected at a significance of 7<jats:italic>σ</jats:italic>. This analysis provides an independent assessment for the accuracy of redshift measurements in a regime that is challenging to calibrate directly owing to known incompleteness in spectroscopic surveys.</jats:p>

Abstract:

We constrain the redshift dependence of gas pressure bias $\left\langle b_{y} P_{\mathrm{e}}\right\rangle$ (bias-weighted average electron pressure), which characterises the thermodynamics of intergalactic gas, through a combination of cross-correlations between galaxy positions and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect, as well as galaxy positions and the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The galaxy sample is from the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS). The tSZ $y$ map and the CMB lensing map are from the {\textit{Planck}} 2015 and 2018 data releases, respectively. The measurements are performed in five redshift bins with $z\lesssim1$. With these measurements, combining galaxy-tSZ and galaxy-CMB lensing cross-correlations allows us to break the degeneracy between galaxy bias and gas pressure bias, and hence constrain them simultaneously. In all redshift bins, the best-fit values of $\bpe$ are at a level of $\sim 0.3\, \mathrm{meV/cm^3}$ and increase slightly with redshift. The galaxy bias is consistent with unity in all the redshift bins. Our results are not sensitive to the non-linear details of the cross-correlation, which are smoothed out by the {\textit{Planck}} beam. Our measurements are in agreement with previous measurements as well as with theoretical predictions. We also show that our conclusions are not changed when CMB lensing is replaced by galaxy lensing, which shows the consistency of the two lensing signals despite their radically different redshift ranges. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using CMB lensing to calibrate the galaxy distribution such that the galaxy distribution can be used as a mass proxy without relying on the precise knowledge of the matter distribution.