71 research outputs found
The quijote simulations
The Quijote simulations are a set of 44,100 full N-body simulations spanning more than 7000 cosmological models in the hyperplane. At a single redshift, the simulations contain more than 8.5 trillion particles over a combined volume of 44,100 each simulation follows the evolution of 2563, 5123, or 10243 particles in a box of 1 h -1 Gpc length. Billions of dark matter halos and cosmic voids have been identified in the simulations, whose runs required more than 35 million core hours. The Quijote simulations have been designed for two main purposes: (1) to quantify the information content on cosmological observables and (2) to provide enough data to train machine-learning algorithms. In this paper, we describe the simulations and show a few of their applications. We also release the petabyte of data generated, comprising hundreds of thousands of simulation snapshots at multiple redshifts; halo and void catalogs; and millions of summary statistics, such as power spectra, bispectra, correlation functions, marked power spectra, and estimated probability density functions
LiteBIRD satellite: JAXA's new strategic L-class mission for all-sky surveys of cosmic microwave background polarization
LiteBIRD, the Lite (Light) satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection, is a space mission for primordial cosmology and fundamental physics. JAXA selected LiteBIRD in May 2019 as a strategic large-class (L-class) mission, with its expected launch in the late 2020s using JAXA's H3 rocket. LiteBIRD plans to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization over the full sky with unprecedented precision. Its main scientific objective is to carry out a definitive search for the signal from cosmic inflation, either making a discovery or ruling out well-motivated inflationary models. The measurements of LiteBIRD will also provide us with an insight into the quantum nature of gravity and other new physics beyond the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. To this end, LiteBIRD will perform full-sky surveys for three years at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L2 for 15 frequency bands between 34 and 448 GHz with three telescopes, to achieve a total sensitivity of 2.16 ΌK-arcmin with a typical angular resolution of 0.5° at 100 GHz. We provide an overview of the LiteBIRD project, including scientific objectives, mission requirements, top-level system requirements, operation concept, and expected scientific outcomes
Concept design of low frequency telescope for CMB B-mode polarization satellite LiteBIRD
LiteBIRD has been selected as JAXAâs strategic large mission in the 2020s, to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization over the full sky at large angular scales. The challenges of LiteBIRD are the wide field-of-view (FoV) and broadband capabilities of millimeter-wave polarization measurements, which are derived from the system requirements. The possible paths of stray light increase with a wider FoV and the far sidelobe knowledge of -56 dB is a challenging optical requirement. A crossed-Dragone configuration was chosen for the low frequency telescope (LFT : 34â161 GHz), one of LiteBIRDâs onboard telescopes. It has a wide field-of-view (18° x 9°) with an aperture of 400 mm in diameter, corresponding to an angular resolution of about 30 arcminutes around 100 GHz. The focal ratio f/3.0 and the crossing angle of the optical axes of 90⊠are chosen after an extensive study of the stray light. The primary and secondary reflectors have rectangular shapes with serrations to reduce the diffraction pattern from the edges of the mirrors. The reflectors and structure are made of aluminum to proportionally contract from warm down to the operating temperature at 5 K. A 1/4 scaled model of the LFT has been developed to validate the wide field-of-view design and to demonstrate the reduced far sidelobes. A polarization modulation unit (PMU), realized with a half-wave plate (HWP) is placed in front of the aperture stop, the entrance pupil of this system. A large focal plane with approximately 1000 AlMn TES detectors and frequency multiplexing SQUID amplifiers is cooled to 100 mK. The lens and sinuous antennas have broadband capability. Performance specifications of the LFT and an outline of the proposed verification plan are presented
Overview of the medium and high frequency telescopes of the LiteBIRD space mission
LiteBIRD is a JAXA-led Strategic Large-Class mission designed to search for the existence of the primordial gravitational waves produced during the inflationary phase of the Universe, through the measurements of their imprint onto the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These measurements, requiring unprecedented sensitivity, will be performed over the full sky, at large angular scales, and over 15 frequency bands from 34 GHz to 448 GHz. The LiteBIRD instruments consist of three telescopes, namely the Low-, Medium-and High-Frequency Telescope (respectively LFT, MFT and HFT). We present in this paper an overview of the design of the Medium-Frequency Telescope (89{224 GHz) and the High-Frequency Telescope (166{448 GHz), the so-called MHFT, under European responsibility, which are two cryogenic refractive telescopes cooled down to 5 K. They include a continuous rotating half-wave plate as the first optical element, two high-density polyethylene (HDPE) lenses and more than three thousand transition-edge sensor (TES) detectors cooled to 100 mK. We provide an overview of the concept design and the remaining specific challenges that we have to face in order to achieve the scientific goals of LiteBIRD
Probing cosmic inflation with the LiteBIRD cosmic microwave background polarization survey
Non-Gaussian modelling and statistical denoising of Planck dust polarisation full-sky maps using scattering transforms
Scattering transforms have been successfully used to describe dust polarisation for flat-sky images. This paper expands this framework to noisy observations on the sphere with the aim of obtaining denoised Stokes Q and U all-sky maps at 353 GHz, as well as a non-Gaussian model of dust polarisation, from the Planck data. To achieve this goal, we extended the computation of scattering coefficients to the HEALPix pixelation and introduced cross-statistics that allowed us to make use of half-mission maps as well as the correlation between dust temperature and polarisation. Introducing a general framework, we developed an algorithm that uses the scattering statistics to separate dust polarisation from data noise. The separation was validated on mock data before it was applied to the SRoll2Planck maps at Nside = 256. The validation shows that the statistics of the dust emission, including its non-Gaussian properties, are recovered until âmax ~ 700, where, at high Galactic latitudes, the dust power is weaker than that of the dust by two orders of magnitude. On scales where the dust power is weaker than one-tenth of the power of the noise, structures in the output maps have comparable statistics, but are not spatially coincident with those of the input maps. Our results on Planck data are significant milestones opening new perspectives for statistical studies of dust polarisation and for the simulation of Galactic polarised foregrounds. The Planck denoised maps are available (see http://sroll20.ias.u-psud.fr/sroll40_353_data.html) together with results from our validation on mock data, which may be used to quantify uncertainties
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