Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

In order to investigate the origin of the ongoing tension between the amplitude of matter fluctuations measured by weak lensing experiments at low redshifts and the value inferred from the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, we reconstruct the evolution of this amplitude from z ∼ 2 using existing large-scale structure data. To do so, we decouple the linear growth of density inhomogeneities from the background expansion, and constrain its redshift dependence making use of a combination of 6 different data sets, including cosmic shear, galaxy clustering and CMB lensing. We analyze these data under a consistent harmonic-space angular power spectrum-based pipeline. We show that current data constrain the amplitude of fluctuations mostly in the range 0.2 < z < 0.7, where it is lower than predicted by Planck. This difference is mostly driven by current cosmic shear data, although the growth histories reconstructed from different data combinations are consistent with each other, and we find no evidence of systematic deviations in any particular experiment. In spite of the tension with Planck, the data are well-described by the ΛCDM model, albeit with a lower value of S8 ≡ σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5 . As part of our analysis, we find constraints on this parameter of S8 = 0.7781 ± 0.0094 (68% confidence level), reaching almost percent-level errors comparable with CMB measurements, and 3.4σ away from the value found by Planck.

Abstract:

Attempts at constraining theories of late time accelerated expansion often assume broad priors for the parameters in their phenomenological description. Focusing on shift-symmetric scalar-tensor theories with standard gravitational wave speed, we show how a more careful analysis of their dynamical evolution leads to much narrower priors. In doing so, we propose a simple and accurate parametrization of these theories, capturing the redshift dependence of the equation of state, w (z), and the kinetic braiding parameter, αB(z) , with only two parameters each, and derive their statistical distribution (also known as theoretical priors) that fit the cosmology of the underlying model. We have considered two versions of the shift-symmetric model, one where the energy density of dark energy is given solely by the scalar field and another where it also has a contribution from the cosmological constant. By including current data, we show how theoretical priors can be used to improve constraints by up to an order of magnitude. Moreover, we show that shift-symmetric theories without a cosmological constant are observationally viable. We work up to quartic order in first derivatives of the scalar in the action, and our results suggest this truncation is a good approximation to more general shift-symmetric theories. This work establishes an actionable link between phenomenological parametrizations and Lagrangian-based theories, the two main approaches to test cosmological gravity and cosmic acceleration.

Abstract:

A recently-proposed algorithm identifies voids in simulations as the regions associated with halos when the initial overdensity field is negated. We apply this method to the real Universe by running a suite of constrained simulations of the 2M++ volume with initial conditions inferred by the BORG algorithm, along with the corresponding inverted set. Our 101 inverted and uninverted simulations, spanning the BORG posterior, each identify ~150,000 "voids as antihalos" with mass exceeding $4.36\times10^{11} \: \mathrm{M_\odot}$ (100 particles) at $z=0$ in a full-sky sphere of radius 155 Mpc/h around the Milky Way. We calculate the size function, volume filling fraction, ellipticity, central and average density, specific angular momentum, clustering and stacked density profile of the voids, and cross-correlate them with those produced by VIDE on the same simulations. We make our antihalo and VIDE catalogues publicly available.

Abstract:

Using a sample of 67 galaxies from the MeerKAT International GigaHertz Tiered Extragalactic Exploration Survey Early Science data, we study the H i-based baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (bTFr), covering a period of ∼1 billion years (0 ≤ z ≤ 0.081). We consider the bTFr based on two different rotational velocity measures: The width of the global H i profile and Vout, measured as the outermost rotational velocity from the resolved H i rotation curves. Both relations exhibit very low intrinsic scatter orthogonal to the best-fitting relation (σ⊥ = 0.07 ± 0.01), comparable to the SPARC sample at z 0. The slopes of the relations are similar and consistent with the z 0 studies (3.66+0.35-0.29 for W50 and 3.47+0.37-0.30 for Vout). We find no evidence that the bTFr has evolved over the last billion years, and all galaxies in our sample are consistent with the same relation independent of redshift and the rotational velocity measure. Our results set-up a reference for all future studies of the H i-based bTFr as a function of redshift that will be conducted with the ongoing deep SKA pathfinders surveys.