Applications of High Resolution High Sensitivity Observations of the CMB

With WMAP putting the phenomenological standard model of cosmology on a strong footing, one can look forward to mining the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for fundamental physics with higher sensitivity and on smaller scales. Future CMB observations have the potential to measure absolute neutrino masses, test for cosmic acceleration independent of supernova Ia observations, probe for the presence of dark energy at redshifts of 2 and larger, illuminate the end of the dark ages, measure the scale--dependence of the primordial power spectrum and detect gravitational waves generated by inflation.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the workshop on "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive

Sequestration of metals in active cap materials: A laboratory and numerical evaluation

Active capping involves the use of capping materials that react with sediment contaminants to reduce their toxicity or bioavailability. Although several amendments have been proposed for use in active capping systems, little is known about their long-term ability to sequester metals. Recent research has shown that the active amendment apatite has potential application for metals contaminated sediments. The focus of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of apatite in the sequestration of metal contaminants through the use of short-term laboratory column studies in conjunction with predictive, numerical modeling. A breakthrough column study was conducted using North Carolina apatite as the active amendment. Under saturated conditions, a spike solution containing elemental As, Cd, Co, Se, Pb, Zn, and a non-reactive tracer was injected into the column. A sand column was tested under similar conditions as a control. Effluent water samples were periodically collected from each column for chemical analysis. Relative to the non-reactive tracer, the breakthrough of each metal was substantially delayed by the apatite. Furthermore, breakthrough of each metal was substantially delayed by the apatite compared to the sand column. Finally, a simple 1-D, numerical model was created to qualitatively predict the long-term performance of apatite based on the findings from the column study. The results of the modeling showed that apatite could delay the breakthrough of some metals for hundreds of years under typical groundwater flow velocities

Distance, Growth Factor, and Dark Energy Constraints from Photometric Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Weak Lensing Measurements

Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) and weak lensing (WL) are complementary probes of cosmology. We explore the distance and growth factor measurements from photometric BAO and WL techniques and investigate the roles of the distance and growth factor in constraining dark energy. We find for WL that the growth factor has a great impact on dark energy constraints but is much less powerful than the distance. Dark energy constraints from WL are concentrated in considerably fewer distance eigenmodes than those from BAO, with the largest contributions from modes that are sensitive to the absolute distance. Both techniques have some well determined distance eigenmodes that are not very sensitive to the dark energy equation of state parameters w_0 and w_a, suggesting that they can accommodate additional parameters for dark energy and for the control of systematic uncertainties. A joint analysis of BAO and WL is far more powerful than either technique alone, and the resulting constraints on the distance and growth factor will be useful for distinguishing dark energy and modified gravity models. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will yield both WL and angular BAO over a sample of several billion galaxies. Joint LSST BAO and WL can yield 0.5% level precision on ten comoving distances evenly spaced in log(1+z) between redshift 0.3 and 3 with cosmic microwave background priors from Planck. In addition, since the angular diameter distance, which directly affects the observables, is linked to the comoving distance solely by the curvature radius in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric solution, LSST can achieve a pure metric constraint of 0.017 on the mean curvature parameter Omega_k of the universe simultaneously with the constraints on the comoving distances.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, details and references added, ApJ accepte

Small-scale CMB Temperature and Polarization Anisotropies due to Patchy Reionization

We study contributions from inhomogeneous (patchy) reionization to arcminute scale ($1000 < \ell < 10,000$) cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. We show that inhomogeneities in the ionization fraction, rather than in the mean density, dominate both the temperature and the polarization power spectra. Depending on the ionization history and the clustering bias of the ionizing sources, we find that rms temperature fluctuations range from 2 $\mu$K to 8 $\mu$K and the corresponding values for polarization are over two orders of magnitude smaller. Reionization can significantly bias cosmological parameter estimates and degrade gravitational lensing potential reconstruction from temperature maps but not from polarization maps. We demonstrate that a simple modeling of the reionization temperature power spectrum may be sufficient to remove the parameter bias. The high-$\ell$ temperature power spectrum will contain some limited information about the sources of reionization.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. Minor changes to match version accepted by Ap

A new method of measuring the cluster peculiar velocity power spectrum

We propose to use spatial correlations of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (KSZ) flux as an estimator of the peculiar velocity power spectrum. In contrast with conventional techniques, our new method does not require measurements of the thermal SZ signal or the X-ray temperature. Moreover, this method has the special advantage that the expected systematic errors are always sub-dominant to statistical errors on all scales and redshifts of interest. We show that future large sky coverage KSZ surveys may allow a peculiar velocity power spectrum estimates of an accuracy reaching ~10%.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, MNRAS in Press (doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13454.x

Can inflationary models of cosmic perturbations evade the secondary oscillation test?

We consider the consequences of an observed Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy spectrum containing no secondary oscillations. While such a spectrum is generally considered to be a robust signature of active structure formation, we show that such a spectrum {\em can} be produced by (very unusual) inflationary models or other passive evolution models. However, we show that for all these passive models the characteristic oscillations would show up in other observable spectra. Our work shows that when CMB polarization and matter power spectra are taken into account secondary oscillations are indeed a signature of even these very exotic passive models. We construct a measure of the observability of secondary oscillations in a given experiment, and show that even with foregrounds both the MAP and \pk satellites should be able to distinguish between models with and without oscillations. Thus we conclude that inflationary and other passive models can {\em not} evade the secondary oscillation test.Comment: Final version accepted for publication in PRD. Minor improvements have been made to the discussion and new data has been included. The conclusions are unchagne

Characterizing and Propagating Modeling Uncertainties in Photometrically-Derived Redshift Distributions

The uncertainty in the redshift distributions of galaxies has a significant potential impact on the cosmological parameter values inferred from multi-band imaging surveys. The accuracy of the photometric redshifts measured in these surveys depends not only on the quality of the flux data, but also on a number of modeling assumptions that enter into both the training set and SED fitting methods of photometric redshift estimation. In this work we focus on the latter, considering two types of modeling uncertainties: uncertainties in the SED template set and uncertainties in the magnitude and type priors used in a Bayesian photometric redshift estimation method. We find that SED template selection effects dominate over magnitude prior errors. We introduce a method for parameterizing the resulting ignorance of the redshift distributions, and for propagating these uncertainties to uncertainties in cosmological parameters.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, version published in Ap

Catastrophic photometric redshift errors: weak lensing survey requirements

We study the sensitivity of weak lensing surveys to the effects of catastrophic redshift errors - cases where the true redshift is misestimated by a significant amount. To compute the biases in cosmological parameters, we adopt an efficient linearized analysis where the redshift errors are directly related to shifts in the weak lensing convergence power spectra. We estimate the number Nspec of unbiased spectroscopic redshifts needed to determine the catastrophic error rate well enough that biases in cosmological parameters are below statistical errors of weak lensing tomography. While the straightforward estimate of Nspec is ~10^6 we find that using only the photometric redshifts with z<=2.5 leads to a drastic reduction in Nspec to ~30,000 while negligibly increasing statistical errors in dark energy parameters. Therefore, the size of spectroscopic survey needed to control catastrophic errors is similar to that previously deemed necessary to constrain the core of the z_s-z_p distribution. We also study the efficacy of the recent proposal to measure redshift errors by cross-correlation between the photo-z and spectroscopic samples. We find that this method requires ~10% a priori knowledge of the bias and stochasticity of the outlier population, and is also easily confounded by lensing magnification bias. The cross-correlation method is therefore unlikely to supplant the need for a complete spectroscopic redshift survey of the source population.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

The Imprint of Gravitational Waves in Models Dominated by a Dynamical Cosmic Scalar Field

An alternative to the standard cold dark matter model has been recently proposed in which a significant fraction of the energy density of the universe is due to a dynamical scalar field ($Q$) whose effective equation-of-state differs from that of matter, radiation or cosmological constant ($\Lambda$). In this paper, we determine how the Q-component modifies the primordial inflation gravitational wave (tensor metric) contribution to the cosmic microwave background anisotropy and, thereby, one of the key tests of inflation.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, revtex, submitted to Phys. Rev.

The Age of the Galactic Disk

I review different methods devised to derive the age of the Galactic Disk, namely the Radio-active Decay (RD), the Cool White Dwarf Luminosity Function (CWDLF), old opne clusters (OOC) and the Color Magnitude Diagram (CMD) of the stars in the solar vicinity. I argue that the disk is likely to be 8-10 Gyr old. Since the bulk of globulars has an age around 13 Gyr, the possibility emerges that the Galaxy experienced a minimum of Star Formation at the end of the halo/bulge formation. This minimum might reflect the time at which the Galaxy started to acquire material to form the disk inside-out.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure, invited review, in "The chemical evolution of the Milky Way : Stars vs Clusters, Vulcano (Italy), 20-24 September 199