1,975 research outputs found
Nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decay: mixing and oscillations
Some extensions beyond the Standard Model propose the existence of nearly
degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos. If kinematically allowed these can be
resonantly produced and decay in a cascade to common final states. The common
decay channels lead to mixing of the heavy sterile neutrino states and
interference effects. We implement non-perturbative methods to study the
dynamics of the cascade decay to common final states, which features
similarities but also noteworthy differences with the case of neutral meson
mixing. We show that mixing and oscillations among the nearly degenerate
sterile neutrinos can be detected as \emph{quantum beats} in the distribution
of final states produced from their decay. These oscillations would be a
telltale signal of mixing between heavy sterile neutrinos. We study in detail
the case of two nearly degenerate sterile neutrinos produced in the decay of
pseudoscalar mesons and decaying into a purely leptonic "visible" channel:
. Possible cosmological implications for the
effective number of neutrinos are discussed.Comment: updated references, more comments, same results, published version.
arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.573
On Preferred Axes in WMAP Cosmic Microwave Background Data after Subtraction of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect
There is currently a debate over the existence of claimed statistical
anomalies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), recently confirmed in
Planck data. Recent work has focussed on methods for measuring statistical
significance, on masks and on secondary anisotropies as potential causes of the
anomalies. We investigate simultaneously the method for accounting for masked
regions and the foreground integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) signal. We search for
trends in different years of WMAP CMB data with different mask treatments. We
reconstruct the ISW field due to the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) and the
NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) up to l=5, and we focus on the Axis of Evil (AoE)
statistic and even/odd mirror parity, both of which search for preferred axes
in the Universe. We find that removing the ISW reduces the significance of
these anomalies in WMAP data, though this does not exclude the possibility of
exotic physics. In the spirit of reproducible research, all reconstructed maps
and codes will be made available for download at
http://www.cosmostat.org/anomaliesCMB.html.Comment: Figure 1-2 and Tables 1, D.1, D.2 updated. Main conclusions
unchanged. Accepted for publication in A&A. In the spirit of reproducible
research, all statistical and sparse inpainting codes as well as resulting
products which constitute main results of this paper will be made public
here: http://www.cosmostat.org/anomaliesCMB.htm
3D galaxy clustering with future wide-field surveys: Advantages of a spherical Fourier-Bessel analysis
Upcoming spectroscopic galaxy surveys are extremely promising to help in
addressing the major challenges of cosmology, in particular in understanding
the nature of the dark universe. The strength of these surveys comes from their
unprecedented depth and width. Optimal extraction of their three-dimensional
information is of utmost importance to best constrain the properties of the
dark universe. Although there is theoretical motivation and novel tools to
explore these surveys using the 3D spherical Fourier-Bessel (SFB) power
spectrum of galaxy number counts , most survey
optimisations and forecasts are based on the tomographic spherical harmonics
power spectrum . We performed a new investigation of the
information that can be extracted from the tomographic and 3D SFB techniques by
comparing the forecast cosmological parameter constraints obtained from a
Fisher analysis in the context of planned stage IV wide-field galaxy surveys.
The comparison was made possible by careful and coherent treatment of
non-linear scales in the two analyses. Nuisance parameters related to a scale-
and redshift-dependent galaxy bias were also included for the first time in the
computation of both the 3D SFB and tomographic power spectra. Tomographic and
3D SFB methods can recover similar constraints in the absence of systematics.
However, constraints from the 3D SFB analysis are less sensitive to unavoidable
systematics stemming from a redshift- and scale-dependent galaxy bias. Even for
surveys that are optimised with tomography in mind, a 3D SFB analysis is more
powerful. In addition, for survey optimisation, the figure of merit for the 3D
SFB method increases more rapidly with redshift, especially at higher
redshifts, suggesting that the 3D SFB method should be preferred for designing
and analysing future wide-field spectroscopic surveys.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Figures. Python package for cosmological forecasts
available at https://cosmicpy.github.io . Updated figures. Matches published
versio
Low-l CMB Analysis and Inpainting
Reconstruction of the CMB in the Galactic plane is extremely difficult due to
the dominant foreground emissions such as Dust, Free-Free or Synchrotron. For
cosmological studies, the standard approach consists in masking this area where
the reconstruction is not good enough. This leads to difficulties for the
statistical analysis of the CMB map, especially at very large scales (to study
for e.g., the low quadrupole, ISW, axis of evil, etc). We investigate in this
paper how well some inpainting techniques can recover the low- spherical
harmonic coefficients. We introduce three new inpainting techniques based on
three different kinds of priors: sparsity, energy and isotropy, and we compare
them. We show that two of them, sparsity and energy priors, can lead to
extremely high quality reconstruction, within 1% of the cosmic variance for a
mask with Fsky larger than 80%.Comment: Submitte
Planck CMB Anomalies: Astrophysical and Cosmological Secondary Effects and the Curse of Masking
Large-scale anomalies have been reported in CMB data with both WMAP and
Planck data. These could be due to foreground residuals and or systematic
effects, though their confirmation with Planck data suggests they are not due
to a problem in the WMAP or Planck pipelines. If these anomalies are in fact
primordial, then understanding their origin is fundamental to either validate
the standard model of cosmology or to explore new physics. We investigate three
other possible issues: 1) the trade-off between minimising systematics due to
foreground contamination (with a conservative mask) and minimising systematics
due to masking, 2) astrophysical secondary effects (the kinetic Doppler
quadrupole and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect), and 3) secondary
cosmological signals (the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect). We address the
masking issue by considering new procedures that use both WMAP and Planck to
produce higher quality full-sky maps using the sparsity methodology (LGMCA
maps). We show the impact of masking is dominant over that of residual
foregrounds, and the LGMCA full-sky maps can be used without further processing
to study anomalies. We consider four official Planck PR1 and two LGMCA CMB
maps. Analysis of the observed CMB maps shows that only the low quadrupole and
quadrupole-octopole alignment seem significant, but that the planar octopole,
Axis of Evil, mirror parity and cold spot are not significant in nearly all
maps considered. After subtraction of astrophysical and cosmological secondary
effects, only the low quadrupole may still be considered anomalous, meaning the
significance of only one anomaly is affected by secondary effect subtraction
out of six anomalies considered. In the spirit of reproducible research all
reconstructed maps and codes will be made available for download here
http://www.cosmostat.org/anomaliesCMB.html.Comment: Summary of results given in Table 2. Accepted for publication in
JCAP, 4th August 201
Joint Planck and WMAP CMB Map Reconstruction
We present a novel estimate of the cosmological microwave background (CMB)
map by combining the two latest full-sky microwave surveys: WMAP nine-year and
Planck PR1. The joint processing benefits from a recently introduced component
separation method coined "local-generalized morphological component analysis''
(LGMCA) based on the sparse distribution of the foregrounds in the wavelet
domain. The proposed estimation procedure takes advantage of the IRIS 100
micron as an extra observation on the galactic center for enhanced dust
removal. We show that this new CMB map presents several interesting aspects: i)
it is a full sky map without using any inpainting or interpolating method, ii)
foreground contamination is very low, iii) the Galactic center is very clean,
with especially low dust contamination as measured by the cross-correlation
between the estimated CMB map and the IRIS 100 micron map, and iv) it is free
of thermal SZ contamination.Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics, accepte
Reconstruction of the cosmic microwave background lensing for Planck
Aims. We prepare real-life cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing extraction with the forthcoming Planck satellite data by studying two systematic effects related to the foreground contamination: the impact of foreground residuals after a component separation on the lensed CMB map, and the impact of removing a large contaminated region of the sky.
Methods. We first use the generalized morphological component analysis (GMCA) method to perform a component separation within a simplified framework, which allows a high statistics Monte-Carlo study. For the second systematic, we apply a realistic mask on the temperature maps and then restore them with a recently developed inpainting technique on the sphere. We investigate the reconstruction of the CMB lensing from the resultant maps using a quadratic estimator in the flat sky limit and on the full sphere.
Results. We find that the foreground residuals from the GMCA method does not significantly alter the lensed signal, which is also true for the mask corrected with the inpainting method, even in the presence of point source residuals
Darth Fader: Using wavelets to obtain accurate redshifts of spectra at very low signal-to-noise
We present the DARTH FADER algorithm, a new wavelet-based method for
estimating redshifts of galaxy spectra in spectral surveys that is particularly
adept in the very low SNR regime. We use a standard cross-correlation method to
estimate the redshifts of galaxies, using a template set built using a PCA
analysis on a set of simulated, noise-free spectra. Darth Fader employs wavelet
filtering to both estimate the continuum & to extract prominent line features
in each galaxy spectrum. A simple selection criterion based on the number of
features present in the spectrum is then used to clean the catalogue: galaxies
with fewer than six total features are removed as we are unlikely to obtain a
reliable redshift estimate. Applying our wavelet-based cleaning algorithm to a
simulated testing set, we successfully build a clean catalogue including
extremely low signal-to-noise data (SNR=2.0), for which we are able to obtain a
5.1% catastrophic failure rate in the redshift estimates (compared with 34.5%
prior to cleaning). We also show that for a catalogue with uniformly mixed SNRs
between 1.0 & 20.0, with realistic pixel-dependent noise, it is possible to
obtain redshifts with a catastrophic failure rate of 3.3% after cleaning (as
compared to 22.7% before cleaning). Whilst we do not test this algorithm
exhaustively on real data, we present a proof of concept of the applicability
of this method to real data, showing that the wavelet filtering techniques
perform well when applied to some typical spectra from the SDSS archive. The
Darth Fader algorithm provides a robust method for extracting spectral features
from very noisy spectra. The resulting clean catalogue gives an extremely low
rate of catastrophic failures, even when the spectra have a very low SNR. For
very large sky surveys, this technique may offer a significant boost in the
number of faint galaxies with accurately determined redshifts.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Astrophysic
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