Imprint of DESI fiber assignment on the anisotropic power spectrum of emission line galaxies

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a multiplexed fiber-fed spectrograph, is a Stage-IV ground-based dark energy experiment aiming to measure redshifts for 29 million Emission-Line Galaxies (ELG), 4 million Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG), and 2 million Quasi-Stellar Objects (QSO). The survey design includes a pattern of tiling on the sky and the locations of the fiber positioners in the focal plane of the telescope, with the observation strategy determined by a fiber assignment algorithm that optimizes the allocation of fibers to targets. This strategy allows a given region to be covered on average five times for a five-year survey, but with coverage varying between zero and twelve, which imprints a spatially-dependent pattern on the galaxy clustering. We investigate the systematic effects of the fiber assignment coverage on the anisotropic galaxy clustering of ELGs and show that, in the absence of any corrections, it leads to discrepancies of order ten percent on large scales for the power spectrum multipoles. We introduce a method where objects in a random catalog are assigned a coverage, and the mean density is separately computed for each coverage factor. We show that this method reduces, but does not eliminate the effect. We next investigate the angular dependence of the contaminated signal, arguing that it is mostly localized to purely transverse modes. We demonstrate that the cleanest way to remove the contaminating signal is to perform an analysis of the anisotropic power spectrum $P(k,\mu)$ and remove the lowest $\mu$ bin, leaving $\mu>0$ modes accurate at the few-percent level. Here, $\mu$ is the cosine of the angle between the line-of-sight and the direction of $\vec{k}$. We also investigate two alternative definitions of the random catalog and show they are comparable but less effective than the coverage randoms method.Comment: Submitted to JCA

Dependency and Delegation: The Ethics of Marital Representation

The two hypotheticals for this symposium concern a lawyer who is asked to represent a married couple in which one spouse would like to cede decision-making authority to the other. As we have examined the lawyer\u27s ethical responsibilities, we have identified two distinct, but conceptually related, issues of legal ethics. The first, a threshold question, deals with the nature of marital representation: May a lawyer simultaneously represent both husband and wife? And if so, how should the representation be structured? The second adds an additional layer of complexity: If a lawyer represents both husband and wife, may the lawyer accept one spouse\u27s delegation of decision- making authority to the other within the representation? And if so, what are the parameters of the delegation

Field Flows of Dark Energy

Scalar field dark energy evolving from a long radiation- or matter-dominated epoch has characteristic dynamics. While slow-roll approximations are invalid, a well defined field expansion captures the key aspects of the dark energy evolution during much of the matter-dominated epoch. Since this behavior is determined, it is not faithfully represented if priors for dynamical quantities are chosen at random. We demonstrate these features for both thawing and freezing fields, and for some modified gravity models, and unify several special cases in the literature.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

The DESI Experiment, a whitepaper for Snowmass 2013

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is a massively multiplexed fiber-fed spectrograph that will make the next major advance in dark energy in the timeframe 2018-2022. On the Mayall telescope, DESI will obtain spectra and redshifts for at least 18 million emission-line galaxies, 4 million luminous red galaxies and 3 million quasi-stellar objects, in order to: probe the effects of dark energy on the expansion history using baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), measure the gravitational growth history through redshift-space distortions, measure the sum of neutrino masses, and investigate the signatures of primordial inflation. The resulting 3-D galaxy maps at z<2 and Lyman-alpha forest at z>2 will make 1%-level measurements of the distance scale in 35 redshift bins, thus providing unprecedented constraints on cosmological models.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, a White Paper for Snowmass 201