693 research outputs found
Robust forecasts on fundamental physics from the foreground-obscured, gravitationally-lensed CMB polarization
[Abridged] Recent results from the BICEP, Keck Array and Planck
Collaborations demonstrate that Galactic foregrounds are an unavoidable
obstacle in the search for evidence of inflationary gravitational waves in the
cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization. Beyond the foregrounds, the
effect of lensing by intervening large-scale structure further obscures all but
the strongest inflationary signals permitted by current data. With a plethora
of ongoing and upcoming experiments aiming to measure these signatures, careful
and self-consistent consideration of experiments' foreground- and
lensing-removal capabilities is critical in obtaining credible forecasts of
their performance. We investigate the capabilities of instruments such as
Advanced ACTPol, BICEP3 and Keck Array, CLASS, EBEX10K, PIPER, Simons Array,
SPT-3G and SPIDER, and projects as COrE+, LiteBIRD-ext, PIXIE and Stage IV, to
clean contamination due to polarized synchrotron and dust from raw
multi-frequency data, and remove lensing from the resulting co-added CMB maps
(either using iterative CMB-only techniques or through cross-correlation with
external data). Incorporating these effects, we present forecasts for the
constraining power of these experiments in terms of inflationary physics, the
neutrino sector, and dark energy parameters. Made publicly available through an
online interface, this tool enables the next generation of CMB experiments to
foreground-proof their designs, optimize their frequency coverage to maximize
scientific output, and determine where cross-experimental collaboration would
be most beneficial. We find that analyzing data from ground, balloon and space
instruments in complementary combinations can significantly improve component
separation performance, delensing, and cosmological constraints over individual
datasets.Comment: 37 pages plus appendices, 15 figures; first two authors contributed
equally to this work; forecasting tool available at http://turkey.lbl.gov.
v4: matches version published in JCAP (with extended dark energy constraints
Dynamical behavior of generic quintessence potentials: constraints on key dark energy observables
We perform a comprehensive study of a class of dark energy models - scalar
field models where the effective potential can be described by a polynomial
series - exploring their dynamical behavior using the method of flow equations
that has previously been applied to inflationary models. Using supernova,
baryon oscillation, CMB and Hubble constant data, and an implicit theoretical
prior imposed by the scalar field dynamics, we find that the LCDM model
provides an excellent fit to the data. Constraints on the generic scalar field
potential parameters are presented, along with the reconstructed w(z) histories
consistent with the data and the theoretical prior. We propose and pursue
computationally feasible algorithms to obtain estimates of the principal
components of the equation of state, as well as parameters w_0 and w_a.
Further, we use the Monte Carlo Markov Chain machinery to simulate future data
based on the Joint Dark Energy Mission, Planck and baryon acoustic oscillation
surveys and find that the inverse area figure of merit improves nearly by an
order of magnitude. Therefore, most scalar field models that are currently
consistent with data can be potentially ruled out by future experiments. We
also comment on the classification of dark energy models into "thawing'" and
"freezing" in light of the more diverse evolution histories allowed by this
general class of potentials.Comment: 22 pages and 12 figures, minor clarifications and a new Figure (#9)
added in v3, matches the published PRD version. Chains and high-res figures
are available at
http://kicp.uchicago.edu/~dhuterer/DE_FLOWROLL/de_flowroll.htm
A novel sampling theorem on the rotation group
We develop a novel sampling theorem for functions defined on the
three-dimensional rotation group SO(3) by connecting the rotation group to the
three-torus through a periodic extension. Our sampling theorem requires
samples to capture all of the information content of a signal band-limited at
, reducing the number of required samples by a factor of two compared to
other equiangular sampling theorems. We present fast algorithms to compute the
associated Fourier transform on the rotation group, the so-called Wigner
transform, which scale as , compared to the naive scaling of .
For the common case of a low directional band-limit , complexity is reduced
to . Our fast algorithms will be of direct use in speeding up the
computation of directional wavelet transforms on the sphere. We make our SO3
code implementing these algorithms publicly available.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, minor changes to match version accepted for
publication. Code available at http://www.sothree.or
Bayesian Analysis of Inflation II: Model Selection and Constraints on Reheating
We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple
ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation
spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute
Bayesian evidence. Particular attention is paid to the specification of
physically realistic priors, including the parametrization of the
post-inflationary expansion and associated thermalization scale. It is
confirmed that while present-day data tightly constrains the properties of the
power spectrum, it cannot usefully distinguish between the members of a large
class of simple inflationary models. We also compute evidence using a simulated
Planck likelihood, showing that while Planck will have more power than WMAP to
discriminate between inflationary models, it will not definitively address the
inflationary model selection problem on its own. However, Planck will place
very tight constraints on any model with more than one observationally-distinct
inflationary regime -- e.g. the large- and small-field limits of the hilltop
inflation model -- and put useful limits on different reheating scenarios for a
given model.Comment: ModeCode package available from
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~hiranya/ModeCode/ModeCode (requires CosmoMC
and MultiNest); to be published in PRD. Typos fixe
Cosmological Constraints on Dissipative Models of Inflation
(Abridged) We study dissipative inflation in the regime where the dissipative
term takes a specific form, \Gamma=\Gamma(\phi), analyzing two models in the
weak and strong dissipative regimes with a SUSY breaking potential. After
developing intuition about the predictions from these models through analytic
approximations, we compute the predicted cosmological observables through full
numerical evolution of the equations of motion, relating the mass scale and
scale of dissipation to the characteristic amplitude and shape of the
primordial power spectrum. We then use Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to
constrain a subset of the models with cosmological data from the cosmic
microwave background (WMAP three-year data) and large scale structure (SDSS
Luminous Red Galaxy power spectrum). We find that the posterior distributions
of the dissipative parameters are highly non-Gaussian and their allowed ranges
agree well with the expectations obtained using analytic approximations. In the
weak regime, only the mass scale is tightly constrained; conversely, in the
strong regime, only the dissipative coefficient is tightly constrained. A lower
limit is seen on the inflation scale: a sub-Planckian inflaton is disfavoured
by the data. In both weak and strong regimes, we reconstruct the limits on the
primordial power spectrum and show that these models prefer a {\it red}
spectrum, with no significant running of the index. We calculate the reheat
temperature and show that the gravitino problem can be overcome with large
dissipation, which in turn leads to large levels of non-Gaussianity: if
dissipative inflation is to evade the gravitino problem, the predicted level of
non-Gaussianity might be seen by the Planck satellite.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by JCAP without text changes,
References adde
Bayesian Analysis of Inflation III: Slow Roll Reconstruction Using Model Selection
We implement Slow Roll Reconstruction -- an optimal solution to the inverse
problem for inflationary cosmology -- within ModeCode, a publicly available
solver for the inflationary dynamics. We obtain up-to-date constraints on the
reconstructed inflationary potential, derived from the WMAP 7-year dataset and
South Pole Telescope observations, combined with large scale structure data
derived from SDSS Data Release 7. Using ModeCode in conjunction with the
MultiNest sampler, we compute Bayesian evidence for the reconstructed potential
at each order in the truncated slow roll hierarchy. We find that the data are
well-described by the first two slow roll parameters, \epsilon and \eta, and
that there is no need to include a nontrivial \xi parameter.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, minor changes; final version; accepted in PR
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