Search

Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe, which is used to constrain the standard cosmological model and its extensions. With the enhanced statistical precision of current and upcoming surveys, high-accuracy predictions for weak lensing statistics are needed to limit the impact of theoretical uncertainties on cosmological parameter constraints. For this purpose, we present a comparison of the theoretical predictions for the non-linear matter and weak lensing power spectra, based on the widely used fitting functions (mead and rev-halofit), emulators (EuclidEmulator, EuclidEmulator2, BaccoEmulator, and CosmicEmulator), and N-body simulations (PKDGRAV3). We consider the forecasted constraints on the ЛCDM and wCDM models from weak lensing for stage III and stage IV surveys. We study the relative bias on the constraints and their dependence on the assumed prescriptions. Assuming a ЛCDM cosmology, we find that the relative agreement on the S8 parameter is between 0.2 and 0.3σ for a stage III-like survey between the above predictors. For a stage IV-like survey the agreement becomes 1.4-3.0σ. In the wCDM scenario, we find broader S8 constraints, and agreements of 0.18-0.26σ and 0.7-1.7σ for stage III and stage IV surveys, respectively. The accuracies of the above predictors therefore appear adequate for stage III surveys, whereas the fitting functions would need improvements for future stage IV surveys. Furthermore, we find that, of the fitting functions, mead provides the best agreement with the emulators. We discuss the implication of these findings for the preparation of future weak lensing surveys, and the relative impact of theoretical uncertainties to other systematics., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 522 (3), ISSN:0035-8711, ISSN:1365-2966

We present a full forward-modeled $w$CDM analysis of the KiDS-1000 weak lensing maps using graph-convolutional neural networks (GCNN). Utilizing the $\texttt{CosmoGrid}$, a novel massive simulation suite spanning six different cosmological parameters, we generate almost one million tomographic mock surveys on the sphere. Due to the large data set size and survey area, we perform a spherical analysis while limiting our map resolution to $\texttt{HEALPix}$ $n_\mathrm{side}=512$. We marginalize over systematics such as photometric redshift errors, multiplicative calibration and additive shear bias. Furthermore, we use a map-level implementation of the non-linear intrinsic alignment model along with a novel treatment of baryonic feedback to incorporate additional astrophysical nuisance parameters. We also perform a spherical power spectrum analysis for comparison. The constraints of the cosmological parameters are generated using a likelihood free inference method called Gaussian Process Approximate Bayesian Computation (GPABC). Finally, we check that our pipeline is robust against choices of the simulation parameters. We find constraints on the degeneracy parameter of $S_8 \equiv \sigma_8\sqrt{\Omega_M/0.3} = 0.78^{+0.06}_{-0.06}$ for our power spectrum analysis and $S_8 = 0.79^{+0.05}_{-0.05}$ for our GCNN analysis, improving the former by 16%. This is consistent with earlier analyses of the 2-point function, albeit slightly higher. Baryonic corrections generally broaden the constraints on the degeneracy parameter by about 10%. These results offer great prospects for full machine learning based analyses of on-going and future weak lensing surveys., Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures

Narrow-band imaging surveys allow the study of the spectral characteristics of galaxies without the need of performing their spectroscopic follow-up. In this work, we forward-model the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS) narrow-band data. The aim is to improve the constraints on the spectral coefficients used to create the galaxy spectral energy distributions (SED) of the galaxy population model in Tortorelli et al. 2020. In that work, the model parameters were inferred from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) data using Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). This led to stringent constraints on the B-band galaxy luminosity function parameters, but left the spectral coefficients only broadly constrained. To address that, we perform an ABC inference using CFHTLS and PAUS data. This is the first time our approach combining forward-modelling and ABC is applied simultaneously to multiple datasets. We test the results of the ABC inference by comparing the narrow-band magnitudes of the observed and simulated galaxies using Principal Component Analysis, finding a very good agreement. Furthermore, we prove the scientific potential of the constrained galaxy population model to provide realistic stellar population properties by measuring them with the SED fitting code \textsc{CIGALE}. We use CFHTLS broad-band and PAUS narrow-band photometry for a flux-limited ($\mathrm{i}, 53 pages, 17 figures, Accepted for publication in JCAP

Modern weak-lensing observations are becoming increasingly sensitive to baryonic feedback processes which are still poorly understood. So far, this challenge has been faced either by imposing scale-cuts in the data or by modelling baryonic effects with simple, one-parameter models. In this paper, we rely on a more general, seven-parameter prescription of baryonic feedback effects, which is primarily motivated by observations and has been shown to agree with a plethora of hydrodynamical simulations. By combining weak-lensing data from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS-1000) with observations of gas around galaxy clusters, we are able to constrain baryonic parameters and learn more about feedback and cosmology. In particular, we use cluster gas fractions from X-ray data and gas profiles from kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (kSZ) observations to provide evidence for baryonic feedback that is stronger than predicted by most hydrodynamical simulations. In terms of the matter power spectrum, we report a beyond-percent effect at wave-modes above $k\sim 0.1-0.45$ h/Mpc and a maximum suppression of $12-33$ percent at $k\sim7$ h/Mpc (68 percent confidence level). Regarding the combined parameter $\Sigma_8=\sigma_8(\Omega_m/0.3)^{0.58}$, we find the known tension with the Planck satellite data to be reduced from 3.8 to 2.9 $\sigma$ once baryonic effects are fully included in the analysis pipeline. The tension is further decreased to 2.6 $\sigma$ when the weak-lensing data is combined with X-ray and kSZ observations. We conclude that, while baryonic feedback effects become more important in modern weak-lensing surveys, they are unlikely to act as the main culprit for the observed $\Sigma_8$-tension., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, published in MNRAS

A cosmic string wake produces a distinct non-Gaussian signal in 21-cm intensity maps at redshifts above that of reionization. While the string signal is (locally) larger in amplitude than the signal of the Gaussian fluctuations of the $\Lambda$CDM model, they are overwhelmed (even locally in position space) by astrophysical and instrumental foregrounds. Here, we study to what extent the signal can be extracted from noisy interferometric data. The narrowness of the string-induced feature in redshift direction allows for a subtraction of astrophysical and instrumental foregrounds. Based on the specific geometry of the string signal we identify a particular three-point statistic which is promising in order to extract the signal, and we find that, having in mind a telescope of specifications similar to that of the MWA instrument, the string signal can be successfully extracted for a value of the string tension of $G\mu = 3 \times 10^{-7}$. Prospects for further improvements of the analysis are discussed., Comment: 35 pages, 21 figures

The combination of different cosmological probes offers stringent tests of the $\Lambda$CDM model and enhanced control of systematics. For this purpose, we present an extension of the lightcone generator UFalcon first introduced in Sgier et al. 2019 (arXiv:1801.05745), enabling the simulation of a self-consistent set of maps for different cosmological probes. Each realization is generated from the same underlying simulated density field, and contains full-sky maps of different probes, namely weak lensing shear, galaxy overdensity including RSD, CMB lensing, and CMB temperature anisotropies from the ISW effect. The lightcone generation performed by UFalcon is parallelized and based on the replication of a large periodic volume simulated with the GPU-accelerated $N$-Body code PkdGrav3. The post-processing to construct the lightcones requires only a runtime of about 1 walltime-hour corresponding to about 100 CPU-hours. We use a randomization procedure to increase the number of quasi-independent full-sky UFalcon map-realizations, which enables us to compute an accurate multi-probe covariance matrix. Using this framework, we forecast cosmological parameter constraints by performing a multi-probe likelihood analysis for a combination of simulated future stage-IV-like surveys. We find that the inclusion of the cross-correlations between the probes significantly increases the information gain in the parameter constraints. We also find that the use of a non-Gaussian covariance matrix is increasingly important, as more probes and cross-correlation power spectra are included. A version of the UFalcon package currently including weak gravitational lensing is publicly available., Comment: 49 pages, 24 pictures, The UFalcon weak lensing package is available here: $\href{https://cosmology.ethz.ch/research/software-lab/UFalcon.html}{https://cosmology.ethz.ch/research/software-lab/UFalcon.html}$

This paper describes the design, implementation, and verification of a test-bed for determining the noise temperature of radio antennas operating between 400-800 MHz. The requirements for this test-bed were driven by the HIRAX experiment, which uses antennas with embedded amplification, making system noise characterization difficult in the laboratory. The test-bed consists of two large cylindrical cavities, each containing radio-frequency (RF) absorber held at different temperatures (300K and 77 K), allowing a measurement of system noise temperature through the well-known ‘Y-factor’ method. The apparatus has been constructed at Yale, and over the course of the past year has undergone detailed verification measurements. To date, three preliminary noise temperature measurement sets have been conducted using the system, putting us on track to make the first noise temperature measurements of the HIRAX feed and perform the first analysis of feed repeatability.

Current and upcoming cosmological experiments open a new era of precision cosmology, thus demanding accurate theoretical predictions for cosmological observables. Because of the complexity of the codes delivering such predictions, reaching a high level of numerical accuracy is challenging. Among the codes already fulfilling this task, PyCosmo is a Python-based framework providing solutions to the Einstein–Boltzmann equations and accurate predictions for cosmological observables. We present the first public release of the code, which is valid in ΛCDM cosmology. The novel aspect of this version is that the user can work within a Python framework, either locally or through an online platform, called PyCosmo Hub. In this work we first describe how the observables are implemented. Then, we check the accuracy of the theoretical predictions for background quantities, power spectra and Limber and beyond-Limber angular power spectra by comparison with other codes: the Core Cosmology Library (CCL), CLASS, HMCode and iCosmo. In our analysis we quantify the agreement of PyCosmo with the other codes, for a range of cosmological models, monitored through a series of unit tests. PyCosmo, conceived as a multi-purpose cosmology calculation tool in Python, is designed to be interactive and user-friendly. The PyCosmo Hub is accessible from this link: https://cosmology.ethz.ch/research/software-lab/PyCosmo.html. On this platform the users can perform their own computations using Jupyter Notebooks without the need of installing any software, access to the results presented in this work and benefit from tutorial notebooks illustrating the usage of the code. The link above also redirects to the code release and documentation., Astronomy and Computing, 36, ISSN:2213-1337

The ability to obtain reliable point estimates of model parameters is of crucial importance in many fields of physics. This is often a difficult task given that the observed data can have a very high number of dimensions. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel approach to construct parameter estimators with a quantifiable bias using an order expansion of highly compressed deep summary statistics of the observed data. These summary statistics are learned automatically using an information maximising loss. Given an observation, we further show how one can use the constructed estimators to obtain approximate Bayes computation (ABC) posterior estimates and their corresponding uncertainties that can be used for parameter inference using Gaussian process regression even if the likelihood is not tractable. We validate our method with an application to the problem of cosmological parameter inference of weak lensing mass maps. We show in that case that the constructed estimators are unbiased and have an almost optimal variance, while the posterior distribution obtained with the Gaussian process regression is close to the true posterior and performs better or equally well than comparable methods., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures

We forecast astrophysical and cosmological parameter constraints from synergies between 21 cm intensity mapping and wide field optical galaxy surveys (both spectroscopic and photometric) over $z \sim 0-3$. We focus on the following survey combinations in this work: (i) a CHIME-like and DESI-like survey in the northern hemisphere, (ii) an LSST-like and SKA I MID-like survey and (ii) a MeerKAT-like and DES-like survey in the southern hemisphere. We work with the $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model having parameters $\{h, \Omega_m, n_s, \Omega_b, \sigma_8\}$, parameters $v_{c,0}$ and $\beta$ representing the cutoff and slope of the HI-halo mass relation in the previously developed HI halo model framework, and a parameter $Q$ that represents the scale dependence of the optical galaxy bias. Using a Fisher forecasting framework, we explore (i) the effects of the HI and galaxy astrophysical uncertainties on the cosmological parameter constraints, assuming priors from the present knowledge of the astrophysics, (ii) the improvements on astrophysical constraints over their current priors in the three configurations considered, (ii) the tightening of the constraints on the parameters relative to the corresponding HI auto-correlation surveys alone., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in MNRAS

DES Collaboration: et al., Weak lensing by large-scale structure is a powerful probe of cosmology and of the dark universe. This cosmic shear technique relies on the accurate measurement of the shapes and redshifts of background galaxies and requires precise control of systematic errors. Monte Carlo control loops (MCCL) is a forward modeling method designed to tackle this problem. It relies on the ultra fast image generator (UFig) to produce simulated images tuned to match the target data statistically, followed by calibrations and tolerance loops. We present the first end-to-end application of this method, on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 wide field imaging data. We simultaneously measure the shear power spectrum Cℓ and the redshift distribution n(z) of the background galaxy sample. The method includes maps of the systematic sources, point spread function (PSF), an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) inference of the simulation model parameters, a shear calibration scheme, and a fast method to estimate the covariance matrix. We find a close statistical agreement between the simulations and the DES Y1 data using an array of diagnostics. In a nontomographic setting, we derive a set of Cℓ and n(z) curves that encode the cosmic shear measurement, as well as the systematic uncertainty. Following a blinding scheme, we measure the combination of Ωm, σ8, and intrinsic alignment amplitude AIA, defined as S8DIA=σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5DIA, where DIA=1−0.11(AIA−1). We find S8DIA=0.895+0.054−0.039, where systematics are at the level of roughly 60% of the statistical errors. We discuss these results in the context of earlier cosmic shear analyses of the DES Y1 data. Our findings indicate that this method and its fast runtime offer good prospects for cosmic shear measurements with future wide-field surveys., Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministerio da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DESBrazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the LudwigMaximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, The Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No, AST-1138766 and No. AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under Grants No. AYA2015-71825, No. ESP2015-66861, No. FPA2015-68048, No. SEV-2016-0588, No. SEV2016-0597, and No. MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. I. F. A. E. is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC Grant agreements No. 240672, No. 291329, and No. 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) e-Universe (CNPq grant No. 465376/2014-2).

In this Letter, we consider the model-independent reconstruction of the expansion and growth functions from the Pantheon supernova data. The method relies on developing the expansion function in terms of shifted Chebyshev polynomials and determining the coefficients of the polynomials by a maximum-likelihood fit to the data. Having obtained the expansion function in a model-independent way, we can then also determine the growth function without assuming a particular model. We then compare the results with the predictions of two classes of Dark Energy models, firstly a class of quintessence scalar field models consistent with the trans-Planckian censorship and swampland conjectures, and secondly a class of generalized Proca vector field models. We determine constraints on the parameters which appear in these models. © 2020 The Author(s), Physics Letters, Section B: Nuclear, Elementary Particle and High-Energy Physics, 812

The galaxy Luminosity Function (LF) is a key observable for galaxy formation, evolution studies and for cosmology. In this work, we propose a novel technique to forward model wide-field broad-band galaxy surveys using the fast image simulator UFig and measure the LF of galaxies in the B-band. We use Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) to constrain the galaxy population model parameters of the simulations and match data from CFHTLS. We define a number of distance metrics between the simulated and the survey data. By exploring the parameter space of the galaxy population model through ABC to find the set of parameters that minimize these distance metrics, we obtain constraints on the LFs of blue and red galaxies as a function of redshift. We find that $\mathrm{M^*}$ fades by $\Delta \mathrm{M}^*_{\mathrm{0.1-1.0,b}} = 0.68 \pm 0.52$ and $\Delta \mathrm{M}^*_{\mathrm{0.1-1.0,r}} = 0.54 \pm 0.48$ magnitudes between redshift $\mathrm{z = 1}$ and $\mathrm{z = 0.1}$ for blue and red galaxies, respectively. We also find that $\phi^*$ for blue galaxies stays roughly constant between redshift $\mathrm{z = 0.1}$ and $\mathrm{z=1}$, while for red galaxies it decreases by $\sim 35\%$. We compare our results to other measurements, finding good agreement at all redshifts, for both blue and red galaxies. To further test our results, we compare the redshift distributions for survey and simulated data. We use the spectroscopic redshift distribution from the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS) and we apply the same selection in colours and magnitudes on our simulations. We find a good agreement between the survey and the simulated redshift distributions. We provide best-fit values and uncertainties for the parameters of the LF. This work offers excellent prospects for measuring other galaxy population properties as a function of redshift using ABC., Comment: Accepted for publication in JCAP, 44 pages, 20 figures, 4 appendices

For the next generation of spectroscopic galaxy surveys, it is important to forecast their performances and to accurately interpret their large data sets. For this purpose, it is necessary to consistently simulate different populations of galaxies, in particular Emission Line Galaxies (ELGs), less used in the past for cosmological purposes. In this work, we further the forward modeling approach presented in Fagioli et al. 2018, by extending the spectra simulator Uspec to model galaxies of different kinds with improved parameters from Tortorelli et al. 2020. Furthermore, we improve the modeling of the selection function by using the image simulator Ufig. We apply this to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and simulate $\sim157,000$ multi-band images. We pre-process and analyse them to apply cuts for target selection, and finally simulate SDSS/BOSS DR14 galaxy spectra. We compute photometric, astrometric and spectroscopic properties for red and blue, real and simulated galaxies, finding very good agreement. We compare the statistical properties of the samples by decomposing them with Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We find very good agreement for red galaxies and a good, but less pronounced one, for blue galaxies, as expected given the known difficulty of simulating those. Finally, we derive stellar population properties, mass-to-light ratios, ages and metallicities, for all samples, finding again very good agreement. This shows how this method can be used not only to forecast cosmology surveys, but it is also able to provide insights into studies of galaxy formation and evolution., Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in JCAP

Cosmic shear data contains a large amount of cosmological information encapsulated in the non-Gaussian features of the weak lensing mass maps. Weak lensing studies mostly rely on two-point statistics to constrain cosmology from cosmic shear data, that do not capture all of this information. Additional non-Gaussian information can be extracted using non-Gaussian statistics. We compare the constraining power in the Ωm–σ8 plane of three map-based non-Gaussian statistics with the angular power spectrum, namely; peak counts, minimum counts and Minkowski functionals. We further analyze the impact of tomography and systematic effects originating from galaxy intrinsic alignments, multiplicative shear bias and photometric redshift systematics. We forecast the performance of the statistics for a stage-3-like weak lensing survey, spanning an area of 5000 deg2 and restrict ourselves to scales ≥ 10 arcmin to avoid baryonic effects. The study follows a forward modelling scheme to predict the statistics at different cosmologies based on N-Body simulations. We find, that in our setup, the considered non-Gaussian statistics provide tighter constraints than the angular power spectrum. The peak counts show the greatest potential, increasing the figure-of-Merit (FoM) in the Ωm–σ8 plane by a factor of about 6, while the minimum counts and the Minkowski functionals yield an increase by a factor of about 3 and 2, respectively. A combined analysis using all non-Gaussian statistics in addition to the power spectrum increases the FoM by a factor of 9 and reduces the error on S8 by ≈ 30%. We find that the importance of tomography is diminished when combining non-Gaussian statistics with the angular power spectrum. The non-Gaussian statistics indeed profit less from tomography and the minimum counts and Minkowski functionals add some robustness against galaxy intrinsic alignment in a non-tomographic setting. We further find that a combination of the angular power spectrum and the non-Gaussian statistics allows us to apply conservative scale cuts in the analysis, thus helping to minimize the impact of baryonic and relativistic effects, while conserving the cosmological constraining power. We make the code that was used to conduct this analysis publicly available to simplify performing such analyses in the future. © 2021 IOP Publishing ISSN:1475-7516

An accurate modelling of baryonic feedback effects is required to exploit the full potential of future weak-lensing surveys such as Euclid or LSST. In this second paper in a series of two, we combine Euclid-like mock data of the cosmic shear power spectrum with an eROSITA X-ray mock of the cluster gas fraction to run a combined likelihood analysis including both cosmological and baryonic parameters. Following the first paper of this series, the baryonic effects (based on the baryonic correction model of Schneider et al. 2019) are included in both the tomographic power spectrum and the covariance matrix. However, this time we assume the more realistic case of a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with massive neutrinos, and we consider several extensions of the currently favoured cosmological model. For the standard $\Lambda$CDM case, we show that including X-ray data reduces the uncertainties on the sum of the neutrino mass by $\sim30$ percent, while there is only a mild improvement on other parameters such as $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$. As extensions of $\Lambda$CDM, we consider the cases of a dynamical dark energy model (wCDM), a $f(R)$ gravity model (fRCDM), and a mixed dark matter model ($\Lambda$MDM) with both a cold and a warm/hot dark matter component. We find that combining weak lensing with X-ray data only leads to a mild improvement of the constraints on the additional parameters of wCDM, while the improvement is more substantial for both fRCDM and $\Lambda$MDM. Ignoring baryonic effects in the analysis pipeline leads to significant false-detections of either phantom dark energy or a light subdominant dark matter component. Overall we conclude that for all cosmologies considered, a general parametrisation of baryonic effects is both necessary and sufficient to obtain tight constraints on cosmological parameters., Comment: Accepted version (JCAP)

Baryonic feedback effects lead to a suppression of the weak lensing angular power spectrum on small scales. The poorly constrained shape and amplitude of this suppression is an important source of uncertainties for upcoming cosmological weak lensing surveys such as Euclid or LSST. In this first paper in a series of two, we use simulations to build a Euclid-like tomographic mock data-set for the cosmic shear power spectrum and the corresponding covariance matrix, which are both corrected for baryonic effects following the baryonification method of Schneider et al. (2019). In addition, we develop an emulator to obtain fast predictions of the baryonic power suppression, allowing us to perform a likelihood inference analysis for a standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology with both cosmological and astrophysical parameters. Our main findings are the following: (i) ignoring baryonic effects leads to a greater than 5$\sigma$ bias on the cosmological parameters $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$; (ii) restricting the analysis to the largest scales, that are mostly unaffected by baryons, makes the bias disappear, but results in a blow-up of the $\Omega_m$-$\sigma_8$ contour area by more than a factor of 10; (iii) ignoring baryonic effects on the covariance matrix does not significantly affect cosmological parameter estimates; (iv) while the baryonic suppression is mildly cosmology dependent, this effect does not noticeably modify the posterior contours. Overall, we conclude that including baryonic uncertainties in terms of nuisance parameters results in unbiased and surprisingly tight constraints on cosmology., Comment: Accepted version (JCAP)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have recently been demonstrated on synthetic data to improve upon the precision of cosmological inference. In particular they have the potential to yield more precise cosmological constraints from weak lensing mass maps than the two-point functions. We present the cosmological results with a CNN from the KiDS-450 tomographic weak lensing dataset, constraining the total matter density $\Omega_m$, the fluctuation amplitude $\sigma_8$, and the intrinsic alignment amplitude $A_{\rm{IA}}$. We use a grid of N-body simulations to generate a training set of tomographic weak lensing maps. We test the robustness of the expected constraints to various effects, such as baryonic feedback, simulation accuracy, different value of $H_0$, or the lightcone projection technique. We train a set of ResNet-based CNNs with varying depths to analyze sets of tomographic KiDS mass maps divided into 20 flat regions, with applied Gaussian smoothing of $\sigma=2.34$ arcmin. The uncertainties on shear calibration and $n(z)$ error are marginalized in the likelihood pipeline. Following a blinding scheme, we derive constraints of $S_8 = \sigma_8 (\Omega_m/0.3)^{0.5} = 0.777^{+0.038}_{-0.036}$ with our CNN analysis, with $A_{\rm{IA}}=1.398^{+0.779}_{-0.724}$. We compare this result to the power spectrum analysis on the same maps and likelihood pipeline and find an improvement of about $30\%$ for the CNN. We discuss how our results offer excellent prospects for the use of deep learning in future cosmological data analysis., Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures

Feedback processes from baryons are expected to strongly affect weak-lensing observables of current and future cosmological surveys. In this paper we present a new parametrisation of halo profiles based on gas, stellar, and dark matter density components. This parametrisation is used to modify outputs of gravity-only $N$-body simulations (following the prescription of Schneider and Teyssier [1]) in order to mimic baryonic effects on the matter density field. The resulting baryonic correction model relies on a few well motivated physical parameters and is able to reproduce the redshift zero clustering signal of hydrodynamical simulations at two percent accuracy below $k\sim10$ h/Mpc. A detailed study of the baryon suppression effects on the matter power spectrum and the weak lensing shear correlation reveals that the signal is dominated by two parameters describing the slope of the gas profile in haloes and the maximum radius of gas ejection. We show that these parameters can be constrained with the observed gas fraction of galaxy groups and clusters from X-ray data. Based on these observations we predict a beyond percent effect on the power spectrum above $k=0.2-1.0$ h/Mpc with a maximum suppression of 15-25 percent around $k\sim 10$ h/Mpc. As a result, the weak lensing angular shear power spectrum is suppressed by 15-25 percent at scales beyond $\ell\sim 100-600$ and the shear correlations $\xi_{+}$ and $\xi_{-}$ are affected at the 10-25 percent level below 5 and 50 arc-minutes, respectively. The relatively large uncertainties of these predictions are a result of the poorly known hydrostatic mass bias of current X-ray observations as well as the generic difficulty to observe the low density gas outside of haloes., Comment: Corrected typo in labelling of Fig 3, 13, and 14

We investigate the implications of string swampland criteria for alternative theories of gravity. Even though this has not rigorously been proven, there is some evidence that exact de Sitter solutions with a positive cosmological constant cannot be successfully embedded into string theory, and that the low energy effective field theories containing a scalar field π with a potential V in the habitable landscape should satisfy the swampland criteria |V′|/V≥c∼O(1). As a paradigmatic class of modified gravity theories for inflation and dark energy, we consider the extensively studied family of Horndeski Lagrangians in view of cosmological observations. Apart from a possible potential term, they contain derivative self-interactions as the Galileon and nonminimal couplings to the gravity sector. Hence, our conclusions on the Galileon sector can be also applied to many other alternative theories with scalar helicity modes containing derivative interactions such as massive gravity and generalized Proca. In the presence of such derivative terms, the dynamics of the scalar mode is substantially modified, and imposing the cosmological evolution constrained by observations places tight constraints on c within the swampland conjecture., Physical Review D, 99 (12), ISSN:1550-7998, ISSN:0556-2821, ISSN:1550-2368

We present a combined cosmic shear analysis of the modeling of line-of-sight distortions on strongly lensed extended arcs and galaxy shape measurements in the COSMOS field. We develop a framework to predict the covariance of strong lensing and galaxy shape measurements of cosmic shear on the basis of the small scale matter power-spectrum. The weak lensing measurement is performed using data from the COSMOS survey calibrated with a cloning scheme using the Ultra Fast Image Generator UFig (Berge 2013). The strong lensing analysis is performed by forward modeling the lensing arcs with a main lensing deflector and external shear components from the same Hubble Space Telescope imaging data set. With a sample of three strong lensing shear measurements we present a 2-sigma detection of the cross-correlation signal between the two complementary measurements of cosmic shear along the identical line of sight. With large samples of lenses available with the next generation ground and space based observatories, the covariance of the signal of the two probes with large samples of lenses allows for systematic checks, cross-calibration of either of the two measurement and the measurement of the small scale shear power-spectrum., 27 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables

We present a new method to measure the redshift-dependent galaxy bias by combining information from the galaxy density field and the weak lensing field. This method is based on Amara et al. (2012), where they use the galaxy density field to construct a bias-weighted convergence field kg. The main difference between Amara et al. (2012) and our new implementation is that here we present another way to measure galaxy bias using tomography instead of bias parameterizations. The correlation between kg and the true lensing field k allows us to measure galaxy bias using different zero-lag correlations, such as / or /. Our method measures the linear bias factor on linear scales under the assumption of no stochasticity between galaxies and matter. We use the MICE simulation to measure the linear galaxy bias for a flux-limited sample (i < 22.5) in tomographic redshift bins using this method. This paper is the first that studies the accuracy and systematic uncertainties associated with the implementation of the method, and the regime where it is consistent with the linear galaxy bias defined by projected 2-point correlation functions (2PCF). We find that our method is consistent with linear bias at the percent level for scales larger than 30 arcmin, while nonlinearities appear at smaller scales. This measurement is a good complement to other measurements of bias, since it does not depend strongly on sigma8 as the 2PCF measurements. We apply this method to the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data in a follow-up paper., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

The nature of dark matter, dark energy and large-scale gravity pose some of the most pressing questions in cosmology today. These fundamental questions require highly precise measurements, and a number of wide-field spectroscopic survey instruments are being designed to meet this requirement. A key component in these experiments is the development of a simulation tool to forecast science performance, define requirement flow-downs, optimize implementation, demonstrate feasibility, and prepare for exploitation. We present SPOKES (SPectrOscopic KEn Simulation), an end-to-end simulation facility for spectroscopic cosmological surveys designed to address this challenge. SPOKES is based on an integrated infrastructure, modular function organization, coherent data handling and fast data access. These key features allow reproducibility of pipeline runs, enable ease of use and provide flexibility to update functions within the pipeline. The cyclic nature of the pipeline offers the possibility to make the science output an efficient measure for design optimization and feasibility testing. We present the architecture, first science, and computational performance results of the simulation pipeline. The framework is general, but for the benchmark tests, we use the Dark Energy Spectrometer (DESpec), one of the early concepts for the upcoming project, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We discuss how the SPOKES framework enables a rigorous process to optimize and exploit spectroscopic survey experiments in order to derive high-precision cosmological measurements optimally.

We study the distribution of dark matter in the nonlinear regime in a model in which the primordial fluctuations include, in addition to the dominant primordial Gaussian fluctuations generated by the standard $\Lambda CDM$ cosmological model, the effects of a cosmic string wake set up at the time of equal matter and radiation, making use of cosmological $N$-body simulations. At early times the string wake leads to a planar overdensity of dark matter. We study how this non-Gaussian pattern of a cosmic string wake evolves in the presence of the Gaussian perturbations, making use of wavelet and ridgelet-like statistics specifically designed to extract string wake signals. At late times the Gaussian fluctuations disrupt the string wake. We find that for a string tension of $G \mu = 10^{-7}$, a value just below the current observational limit, the effects of a string wake can be identified in the dark matter distribution, using the current level of the statistical analysis, down to a redshift of $z = 10$., Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures

With the high-precision data from current and upcoming experiments, it becomes increasingly important to perform consistency tests of the standard cosmological model. In this work, we focus on consistency measures between different data sets and methods that allow us to assess the goodness of fit of different models. We address both of these questions using the relative entropy or Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence [Kullback et al., 1951]. First, we revisit the relative entropy as a consistency measure between data sets and further investigate some of its key properties, such as asymmetry and path dependence. We then introduce a novel model rejection framework, which is based on the relative entropy and the posterior predictive distribution. We validate the method on several toy models and apply it to Type Ia supernovae data from the JLA and CMB constraints from Planck 2015, testing the consistency of the data with six different cosmological models., 31 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, updated following referee's comments, matches version accepted by JCAP

In this recent Letter [1], we studied the implications of string Swampland conjectures for quintessence models of dark energy. A couple of days ago, a paper appeared [2] which refers to our work but misrepresents what we have done. Here, we set the record straight.

Weak Gravitational Lensing is a powerful probe of the dark sector of the Universe. One of the main challenges for this technique is the treatment of systematics in the measurement of cosmic shear from galaxy shapes. In an earlier work, Refregier & Amara (2014) have proposed the Monte Carlo Control Loops (MCCL) to overcome these effects using a forward modeling approach. We focus here on one of the control loops in this method, the task of which is the calibration of the shear measurement. For this purpose, we first consider the requirements on the shear systematics for a given survey and propagate them to different systematics terms. We use two one-point statistics to calibrate the shear measurement and six further one-point statistics as diagnostics. We also propagate the systematics levels that we estimate from the one-point functions to the two-point functions for the different systematic error sources. This allows us to assess the consistency between the systematics levels measured in different ways. To test the method, we construct synthetic sky surveys with an area of 1,700 deg$^2$. With some simplifying assumptions, we are able to meet the requirements on the shear calibration for this survey configuration. Furthermore, we account for the total residual shear systematics in terms of the contributing sources. We discuss how this MCCL framework can be applied to current and future weak lensing surveys., 23 pages, 4 figures, prepared for submission to JCAP

We describe the first public data release of the Dark Energy Survey, DES DR1, consisting of reduced single epoch images, coadded images, coadded source catalogs, and associated products and services assembled over the first three years of DES science operations. DES DR1 is based on optical/near-infrared imaging from 345 distinct nights (August 2013 to February 2016) by the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. We release data from the DES wide-area survey covering ~5,000 sq. deg. of the southern Galactic cap in five broad photometric bands, grizY. DES DR1 has a median delivered point-spread function of g = 1.12, r = 0.96, i = 0.88, z = 0.84, and Y = 0.90 arcsec FWHM, a photometric precision of < 1% in all bands, and an astrometric precision of 151 mas. The median coadded catalog depth for a 1.95" diameter aperture at S/N = 10 is g = 24.33, r = 24.08, i = 23.44, z = 22.69, and Y = 21.44 mag. DES DR1 includes nearly 400M distinct astronomical objects detected in ~10,000 coadd tiles of size 0.534 sq. deg. produced from ~39,000 individual exposures. Benchmark galaxy and stellar samples contain ~310M and ~ 80M objects, respectively, following a basic object quality selection. These data are accessible through a range of interfaces, including query web clients, image cutout servers, jupyter notebooks, and an interactive coadd image visualization tool. DES DR1 constitutes the largest photometric data set to date at the achieved depth and photometric precision., 30 pages, 20 Figures. Release page found at this url https://des.ncsa.illinois.edu/releases/dr1

Modeling the Point Spread Function (PSF) of wide-field surveys is vital for many astrophysical applications and cosmological probes including weak gravitational lensing. The PSF smears the image of any recorded object and therefore needs to be taken into account when inferring properties of galaxies from astronomical images. In the case of cosmic shear, the PSF is one of the dominant sources of systematic errors and must be treated carefully to avoid biases in cosmological parameters. Recently, forward modeling approaches to calibrate shear measurements within the Monte-Carlo Control Loops ($MCCL$) framework have been developed. These methods typically require simulating a large amount of wide-field images, thus, the simulations need to be very fast yet have realistic properties in key features such as the PSF pattern. Hence, such forward modeling approaches require a very flexible PSF model, which is quick to evaluate and whose parameters can be estimated reliably from survey data. We present a PSF model that meets these requirements based on a fast deep-learning method to estimate its free parameters. We demonstrate our approach on publicly available SDSS data. We extract the most important features of the SDSS sample via principal component analysis. Next, we construct our model based on perturbations of a fixed base profile, ensuring that it captures these features. We then train a Convolutional Neural Network to estimate the free parameters of the model from noisy images of the PSF. This allows us to render a model image of each star, which we compare to the SDSS stars to evaluate the performance of our method. We find that our approach is able to accurately reproduce the SDSS PSF at the pixel level, which, due to the speed of both the model evaluation and the parameter estimation, offers good prospects for incorporating our method into the $MCCL$ framework., 25 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

Upcoming weak lensing surveys will probe large fractions of the sky with unprecedented accuracy. To infer cosmological constraints, a large ensemble of survey simulations are required to accurately model cosmological observables and their covariances. We develop a parallelized multi-lens-plane pipeline called UFalcon, designed to generate full-sky weak lensing maps from lightcones within a minimal runtime. It makes use of L-PICOLA, an approximate numerical code, which provides a fast and accurate alternative to cosmological $N$-Body simulations. The UFalcon maps are constructed by nesting 2 simulations covering a redshift-range from $z=0.1$ to $1.5$ without replicating the simulation volume. We compute the convergence and projected overdensity maps for L-PICOLA in the lightcone or snapshot mode. The generation of such a map, including the L-PICOLA simulation, takes about 3 hours walltime on 220 cores. We use the maps to calculate the spherical harmonic power spectra, which we compare to theoretical predictions and to UFalcon results generated using the full $N$-Body code GADGET-2. We then compute the covariance matrix of the full-sky spherical harmonic power spectra using 150 UFalcon maps based on L-PICOLA in lightcone mode. We consider the PDF, the higher-order moments and the variance of the smoothed field variance to quantify the accuracy of the covariance matrix, which we find to be a few percent for scales $\ell \sim 10^2$ to $10^3$. We test the impact of this level of accuracy on cosmological constraints using an optimistic survey configuration, and find that the final results are robust to this level of uncertainty. The speed and accuracy of our developed pipeline provides a basis to also include further important features such as masking, varying noise and will allow us to compute covariance matrices for models beyond $\Lambda$CDM. [abridged], Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures

Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the dark sector, once measurement systematic errors can be controlled. In Refregier & Amara (2014), a calibration method based on forward modeling, called MCCL, was proposed. This relies on fast image simulations (e.g., UFig; Berge et al. 2013) that capture the key features of galaxy populations and measurement effects. The MCCL approach has been used in Herbel et al. (2017) to determine the redshift distribution of cosmological galaxy samples and, in the process, the authors derived a model for the galaxy population mainly based on broad-band photometry. Here, we test this model by forward modeling the 40 narrow-band photometry given by the novel PAU Survey (PAUS). For this purpose, we apply the same forced photometric pipeline on data and simulations using Source Extractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996). The image simulation scheme performance is assessed at the image and at the catalogues level. We find good agreement for the distribution of pixel values, the magnitudes, in the magnitude-size relation and the interband correlations. A principal component analysis is then performed, in order to derive a global comparison of the narrow-band photometry between the data and the simulations. We use a `mixing' matrix to quantify the agreement between the observed and simulated sets of Principal Components (PCs). We find good agreement, especially for the first three most significant PCs. We also compare the coefficients of the PCs decomposition. While there are slight differences for some coefficients, we find that the distributions are in good agreement. Together, our results show that the galaxy population model derived from broad-band photometry is in good overall agreement with the PAUS data. This offers good prospect for incorporating spectral information to the galaxy model by adjusting it to the PAUS narrow-band data using forward modeling., Submitted to JCAP, 28 pages, 15 figures, 3 appendices

This article has been accepted for publication in MNRAS ©: 2018 The Autor(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved., We present a mock catalogue for the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS) and use it to quantify the competitiveness of narrow-band imaging for measuring spectral features and galaxy clustering. The mock agrees with observed number count and redshift distribution data. We demonstrate the importance of including emission lines in the narrow-band fluxes. We show that PAUCam has sufficient resolution to measure the strength of the 4000 Å break to the nominal PAUS depth. We predict the evolution of a narrow-band luminosity function and show how this can be affected by the OII emission line. We introduce new rest-frame broad-bands (UV and blue) that can be derived directly from the narrow-band fluxes. We use these bands along with D4000 and redshift to define galaxy samples and provide predictions for galaxy clustering measurements. We show that systematic errors in the recovery of the projected clustering due to photometric redshift errors in PAUS are significantly smaller than the expected statistical errors. The galaxy clustering on two halo scales can be recovered quantitatively without correction, and all qualitative trends seen in the one halo term are recovered. In this analysis, mixing between samples reduces the expected contrast between the one halo clustering of red and blue galaxies and demonstrates the importance of a mock catalogue for interpreting galaxy clustering results. The mock catalogue is available on request at https://cosmohub.pic.es/home., This work was supported by the Science and Technol- ogy Facilities Council [ST/J501013/1, ST/L00075X/1]. PN acknowledges the support of the Royal Society through the award of a University Research Fellowship and the Euro- pean Research Council, through receipt of a Starting Grant (DEGAS-259586). We acknowledge support from the Royal Society international exchange programme. This work used the DiRAC Data Centric system at Durham University, operated by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility www.dirac. ac.uk. This equipment was funded by BIS National E- infrastructure cap- ital grant ST/K00042X/1, STFC capital grant ST/H008519/1, and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K003267/1 and Durham University. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure. Funding for PAUS has been provided by Durham Uni- versity (via the ERC StG DEGAS-259586), ETH Zurich, Leiden University (via ERC StG ADULT-279396 and Netherlands Organisation for Scienti c Research (NWO) Vici grant 639.043.512) and University College London. The PAUS participants from Spanish institutions are par- tially supported by MINECO under grants CSD2007-00060, AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV- 2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IEEC and IFAE are partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya.Funding for PAUS has been provided by Durham Uni- versity (via the ERC StG DEGAS-259586), ETH Zurich, Leiden University (via ERC StG ADULT-279396 and Netherlands Organisation for Scienti c Research (NWO) Vici grant 639.043.512) and University College London. The PAUS participants from Spanish institutions are par- tially supported by MINECO under grants CSD2007-00060, AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV- 2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IEEC and IFAE are partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Funding for PAUS has been provided by Durham Uni- versity (via the ERC StG DEGAS-259586), ETH Zurich, Leiden University (via ERC StG ADULT-279396 and Netherlands Organisation for Scienti c Research (NWO) Vici grant 639.043.512) and University College London. The PAUS participants from Spanish institutions are par- tially supported by MINECO under grants CSD2007-00060, AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV- 2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union

Deep learning is a powerful analysis technique that has recently been proposed as a method to constrain cosmological parameters from weak lensing mass maps. Due to its ability to learn relevant features from the data, it is able to extract more information from the mass maps than the commonly used power spectrum, and thus achieve better precision for cosmological parameter measurement. We explore the advantage of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) over the power spectrum for varying levels of shape noise and different smoothing scales applied to the maps. We compare the cosmological constraints from the two methods in the $\Omega_M-\sigma_8$ plane for sets of 400 deg$^2$ convergence maps. We find that, for a shape noise level corresponding to 8.53 galaxies/arcmin$^2$ and the smoothing scale of $\sigma_s = 2.34$ arcmin, the network is able to generate 45% tighter constraints. For smaller smoothing scale of $\sigma_s = 1.17$ the improvement can reach $\sim 50 \%$, while for larger smoothing scale of $\sigma_s = 5.85$, the improvement decreases to 19%. The advantage generally decreases when the noise level and smoothing scales increase. We present a new training strategy to train the neural network with noisy data, as well as considerations for practical applications of the deep learning approach., Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures

In this Letter, we study the implications of string Swampland criteria for dark energy in view of ongoing and future cosmological observations. If string theory should be the ultimate quantum gravity theory, there is evidence that exact de Sitter solutions with a positive cosmological constant cannot describe the fate of the late-time universe. Even though cosmological models with dark energy given by a scalar field $\pi$ evolving in time are not in direct tension with string theory, they have to satisfy the Swampland criteria $|\Delta\pi|c\sim\mathcal{O}(1)$, where $V$ is the scalar field potential. In view of the restrictive implications that the Swampland criteria have on dark energy, we investigate the accuracy needed for future observations to tightly constrain standard dark-energy models. We find that current 3-$\sigma$ constraints with $c \lesssim 1.35$ are still well in agreement with the string Swampland criteria. However, Stage-4 surveys such as Euclid, LSST and DESI, tightly constraining the equation of state $w(z)$, will start putting surviving quintessence models into tensions with the string Swampland criteria by demanding $c, Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, version 2: small changes and references added

We present the gauge-invariant formalism of cosmological weak lensing, accounting for all the relativistic effects due to the scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations at the linear order. While the light propagation is fully described by the geodesic equation, the relation of the photon wavevector to the physical quantities requires the specification of the frames, where they are defined. By constructing the local tetrad bases at the observer and the source positions, we clarify the relation of the weak lensing observables such as the convergence, the shear, and the rotation to the physical size and shape defined in the source rest-frame and the observed angle and redshift measured in the observer rest-frame. Compared to the standard lensing formalism, additional relativistic effects contribute to all the lensing observables. We explicitly verify the gauge-invariance of the lensing observables and compare our results to previous work. In particular, we demonstrate that even in the presence of the vector and tensor perturbations, the physical rotation of the lensing observables vanishes at the linear order, while the tetrad basis rotates along the light propagation compared to a FRW coordinate. Though the latter is often used as a probe of primordial gravitational waves, the rotation of the tetrad basis is indeed not a physical observable. We further clarify its relation to the E-B decomposition in weak lensing. Our formalism provides a transparent and comprehensive perspective of cosmological weak lensing., Comment: 48 pages, 1 figure, published in JCAP