Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

© 2016 The Authors. We develop a statistical estimator to infer the redshift probability distribution of a photometric sample of galaxies from its angular cross-correlation in redshift bins with an overlapping spectroscopic sample. This estimator is a minimum-variance weighted quadratic function of the data: a quadratic estimator. This extends and modifies the methodology presented by McQuinn & White. The derived source redshift distribution is degenerate with the source galaxy bias, which must be constrained via additional assumptions. We apply this estimator to constrain source galaxy redshift distributions in theKilo-Degree imaging survey through crosscorrelation with the spectroscopic 2-degree Field Lensing Survey, presenting results first as a binned step-wise distribution in the range z < 0.8, and then building a continuous distribution using a Gaussian process model. We demonstrate the robustness of our methodology using mock catalogues constructed from N-body simulations, and comparisons with other techniques for inferring the redshift distribution.

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.