Methods for Rapidly Processing Angular Masks of Next-Generation Galaxy Surveys

As galaxy surveys become larger and more complex, keeping track of the completeness, magnitude limit, and other survey parameters as a function of direction on the sky becomes an increasingly challenging computational task. For example, typical angular masks of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey contain about N=300,000 distinct spherical polygons. Managing masks with such large numbers of polygons becomes intractably slow, particularly for tasks that run in time O(N^2) with a naive algorithm, such as finding which polygons overlap each other. Here we present a "divide-and-conquer" solution to this challenge: we first split the angular mask into predefined regions called "pixels," such that each polygon is in only one pixel, and then perform further computations, such as checking for overlap, on the polygons within each pixel separately. This reduces O(N^2) tasks to O(N), and also reduces the important task of determining in which polygon(s) a point on the sky lies from O(N) to O(1), resulting in significant computational speedup. Additionally, we present a method to efficiently convert any angular mask to and from the popular HEALPix format. This method can be generically applied to convert to and from any desired spherical pixelization. We have implemented these techniques in a new version of the mangle software package, which is freely available at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mangle/, along with complete documentation and example applications. These new methods should prove quite useful to the astronomical community, and since mangle is a generic tool for managing angular masks on a sphere, it has the potential to benefit terrestrial mapmaking applications as well.Comment: New version 2.1 of the mangle software now available at http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mangle/ - includes galaxy survey masks and galaxy lists for the latest SDSS data release and the 2dFGRS final data release as well as extensive documentation and examples. 14 pages, 9 figures, matches version accepted by MNRA

A model of diffuse Galactic Radio Emission from 10 MHz to 100 GHz

Understanding diffuse Galactic radio emission is interesting both in its own right and for minimizing foreground contamination of cosmological measurements. Cosmic Microwave Background experiments have focused on frequencies > 10 GHz, whereas 21 cm tomography of the high redshift universe will mainly focus on < 0.2 GHz, for which less is currently known about Galactic emission. Motivated by this, we present a global sky model derived from all publicly available total power large-area radio surveys, digitized with optical character recognition when necessary and compiled into a uniform format, as well as the new Villa Elisa data extending the 1.4 GHz map to the entire sky. We quantify statistical and systematic uncertainties in these surveys by comparing them with various global multi-frequency model fits. We find that a principal component based model with only three components can fit the 11 most accurate data sets (at 10, 22, 45 & 408 MHz and 1.4, 2.3, 23, 33, 41, 61, 94 GHz) to an accuracy around 1%-10% depending on frequency and sky region. Both our data compilation and our software returning a predicted all-sky map at any frequency from 10 MHz to 100 GHz are publicly available at http://space.mit.edu/home/angelica/gsm .Comment: Accuracy improved with 5-year WMAP data. Our data, software and new foreground-cleaned WMAP map are available at https://ascl.net/1011.01

Search for Supersymmetry in pp Collisions at root s=13 TeV in the Single-Lepton Final State Using the Sum of Masses of Large-Radius Jets

Peer reviewe

Search for top-squark pair production in the single-lepton final state in pp collisions at

This paper presents a search for the pair production of top squarks in events with a single isolated electron or muon, jets, large missing transverse momentum, and large transverse mass. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb−1 of pp collisions collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=8~\mathrm{TeV}$. No significant excess in data is observed above the expectation from standard model processes. The results are interpreted in the context of supersymmetric models with pair production of top squarks that decay either to a top quark and a neutralino or to a bottom quark and a chargino. For small mass values of the lightest supersymmetric particle, top-squark mass values up to around 650 GeV are excluded

Search for heavy resonances decaying to tau lepton pairs in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search for heavy resonances that decay to tau lepton pairs is performed using proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV. The data were collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 2.2 fb(-1). The observations are in agreement with standard model predictions. An upper limit at 95% confidence level on the product of the production cross section and branching fraction into tau lepton pairs is calculated as a function of the resonance mass. For the sequential standard model, the presence of Z’ bosons decaying into tau lepton pairs is excluded for Z/ masses below 2.1 TeV, extending previous limits for this final state. For the topcolor-assisted technicolor model, which predicts Z’ bosons that preferentially couple to third-generation fermions, Z’ masses below 1.7 TeV are excluded, representing the most stringent limit to date