Prof. David Alonso

Abstract:

Observational cosmology in the next decade will rely on probes of the distribution of matter in the redshift range between $0

Abstract:

Future surveys will access large volumes of space and hence very long wavelength fluctuations of the matter density and gravitational field. It has been argued that the set of secondary effects that affect the galaxy distribution, relativistic in nature, will bring new, complementary cosmological constraints. We study this claim in detail by focusing on a subset of wide-area future surveys: Stage-4 cosmic microwave background experiments and photometric redshift surveys. In particular, we look at the magnification lensing contribution to galaxy clustering and general relativistic corrections to all observables. We quantify the amount of information encoded in these effects in terms of the tightening of the final cosmological constraints as well as the potential bias in inferred parameters associated with neglecting them. We do so for a wide range of cosmological parameters, covering neutrino masses, standard dark-energy parametrizations and scalar-tensor gravity theories. Our results show that, while the effect of lensing magnification to number counts does not contain a significant amount of information when galaxy clustering is combined with cosmic shear measurements, this contribution does play a significant role in biasing estimates on a host of parameter families if unaccounted for. Since the amplitude of the magnification term is controlled by the slope of the source number counts with apparent magnitude, $s(z)$, we also estimate the accuracy to which this quantity must be known to avoid systematic parameter biases, finding that future surveys will need to determine $s(z)$ to the $\sim$5-10\% level. On the contrary, large-scale general-relativistic corrections are irrelevant both in terms of information content and parameter bias for most cosmological parameters, but significant for the level of primordial non-Gaussianity.

Abstract:

We analyze the clustering of galaxies in the first public data release of the HSC Subaru Strategic Program. Despite the relatively small footprints of the observed fields, the data are an excellent proxy for the deep photometric datasets that will be acquired by LSST, and are therefore an ideal test bed for the analysis methods being implemented by the LSST DESC. We select a magnitude limited sample with $i<24.5$ and analyze it in four redshift bins covering $0.15\lesssim z \lesssim1.5$. We carry out a Fourier-space analysis of the two-point clustering of this sample, including all auto- and cross-correlations. We demonstrate the use of map-level deprojection methods to account for fluctuations in the galaxy number density caused by observational systematics. Through an HOD analysis, we place constraints on the characteristic halo masses of this sample, finding a good fit up to scales $k_{\rm max}=1\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, including both auto- and cross-correlations. Our results show monotonically decreasing average halo masses, which can be interpreted in terms of the drop-out of red galaxies at high redshifts for a flux-limited sample. In terms of photometric redshift systematics, we show that additional care is needed in order to marginalize over uncertainties in the redshift distribution in galaxy clustering, and that these uncertainties can be constrained by including cross-correlations. We are able to make a $\sim3\sigma$ detection of lensing magnification in the HSC data. Our results are stable to variations in $\sigma_8$ and $\Omega_c$ and we find constraints that agree well with measurements from Planck and low-redshift probes. Finally, we use our pipeline to study the clustering of galaxies as a function of limiting flux, and provide a simple fitting function for the linear galaxy bias for magnitude limited samples as a function of limiting magnitude and redshift. [abridged]