Prof. David Alonso

Abstract:

An important indicator of modified gravity is the effect of the local environment on halo properties. This paper examines the influence of the local tidal structure on the halo mass function, the halo orientation, spin and the concentration-mass relation. We use the excursion set formalism to produce a halo mass function conditional on large-scale structure. Our simple model agrees well with simulations on large scales at which the density field is linear or weakly non-linear. Beyond this, our principal result is that f() does affect halo abundances, the halo spin parameter and the concentration-mass relationship in an environment-independent way, whereas we find no appreciable deviation from \text{ΛCDM} for the mass function with fixed environment density, nor the alignment of the orientation and spin vectors of the halo to the eigenvectors of the local cosmic web. There is a general trend for greater deviation from \text{ΛCDM} in underdense environments and for high-mass haloes, as expected from chameleon screening.

Abstract:

We quantitatively investigate the possibility of detecting baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) using single-dish 21 cm intensity mapping observations in the post-reionization era. We show that the telescope beam smears out the isotropic BAO signature and, in the case of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) instrument, makes it undetectable at redshifts z ≳ 1. We however demonstrate that the BAO peak can still be detected in the radial 21 cm power spectrum and describe a method to make this type of measurements. By means of numerical simulations, containing the 21 cm cosmological signal as well as the most relevant Galactic and extra-Galactic foregrounds and basic instrumental effect, we quantify the precision with which the radial BAO scale can be measured in the 21 cm power spectrum. We systematically investigate the signal to noise and the precision of the recovered BAO signal as a function of cosmic variance, instrumental noise, angular resolution and foreground contamination. We find that the expected noise levels of SKA would degrade the final BAO errors by ∼5 per cent with respect to the cosmic-variance limited case at low redshifts, but that the effect grows up to ∼65 per cent at z ∼ 2–3. Furthermore, we find that the radial BAO signature is robust against foreground systematics, and that the main effect is an increase of ∼20 per cent in the final uncertainty on the standard ruler caused by the contribution of foreground residuals as well as the reduction in sky area needed to avoid high-foreground regions. We also find that it should be possible to detect the radial BAO signature with high significance in the full redshift range. We conclude that a 21 cm experiment carried out by the SKA should be able to make direct measurements of the expansion rate H(z) with measure the expansion with competitive per cent level precision on redshifts z ≲ 2.5.