CO lines in high redshift galaxies: perspective for future mm instruments

Nearly 10 high redshift (z>2) starburst galaxies have recently been detected in the CO lines, revealing the early presence in the universe of objects with large amounts of already-enriched molecular gas. The latter has sufficient density to be excited in the high-level rotational CO lines, which yield more flux, making easier high-redshift detections; however the effect is not as strong as for the sub-millimeter and far-infrared dust continuum emission. With the help of simple galaxy models, based on these first detections, we estimate the flux in all CO lines expected for such starbursting objects at various redshifts. We discuss the detection perspectives with the future millimeter instruments.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, accepted in A &

Medically Assisted Procreation and Same-Sex Couples: The Italian Corte di Cassazione Stands its Ground

This contribution examines a recent ruling of the Italian Corte di Cassazione, concerning the recognition of parentage resulting from medically assisted procreation (“map”) techniques performed abroad by female same-sex couples. In cases where the birth of the child occurs in Italy, the Italian birth certificate usually contains the indication of the woman who gave birth, but does not mention the intentional mother, even when the latter has a biological relationship with the child. The Corte di Cassazione has confirmed its consolidated position in denying the amendment of the birth certificate, on the basis of a rigorous interpretation of the limits provided by the Law No. 40/2004. The Italian law prohibits the access of map techniques by same-sex couples, because their condition cannot be equated to a pathological infertility. The ruling under review overlooks the human rights implications possibly deriving from the recognition of intentional motherhood: in rejecting the allegations concerning the infringment of the fundamental rights enshrined by the European Convention on Human Rights (“echr”), the court has stated that the gaps in protection that may result from the application of Italian law may only be solved through an intervention of the lawmaker

Increasing the lensing figure of merit through higher order convergence moments

The unprecedented quality, the increased data set, and the wide area of ongoing and near future weak lensing surveys allows one to move beyond the standard two points statistics, thus making it worthwhile to investigate higher order probes. As an interesting step toward this direction, we explore the use of higher order moments (HOM) of the convergence field as a way to increase the lensing figure of merit (FoM). To this end, we rely on simulated convergence to first show that HOM can be measured and calibrated so that it is indeed possible to predict them for a given cosmological model provided suitable nuisance parameters are introduced and then marginalized over. We then forecast the accuracy on cosmological parameters from the use of HOM alone and in combination with standard shear power spectra tomography. It turns out that HOM allow one to break some common degeneracies, thus significantly boosting the overall FoM. We also qualitatively discuss possible systematics and how they can be dealt with

Minkowski Functionals of Convergence Maps and the Lensing Figure of Merit

Minkowski functionals (MFs) quantify the topological properties of a given field probing its departure from Gaussianity. We investigate their use on lensing convergence maps in order to see whether they can provide further insights on the underlying cosmology with respect to the standard second-order statistics, i.e., cosmic shear tomography. To this end, we first present a method to match theoretical predictions with measured MFs taking care of the shape noise, imperfections in the map reconstruction, and inaccurate description of the nonlinearities in the matter power spectrum and bispectrum. We validate this method against simulated maps reconstructed from shear fields generated by the MICE simulation. We then perform a Fisher matrix analysis to forecast the accuracy on cosmological parameters from a joint MFs and shear tomography analysis. It turns out that MFs are indeed helpful to break the $\Omega_{\rm m}$--$\sigma_8$ degeneracy thus generating a sort of chain reaction leading to an overall increase of the Figure of Merit.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Matches published version in PR

The Genetic-Induced Hearing Loss Can Block the Effect of Noise Trauma in Waltzing Guinea pig

AbstractThe waltzing guinea pig may be a good model to investigate if genetic factor can change the sensitivity in noise-induced hearing loss. A total of 34 waltzig guinea pigs were studied and we found that there is no any significant increased sensitivity to noise trauma if the age-induced hearing loss was considered in waltzing guinea pig

Mass - concentration relation and weak lensing peak counts

The statistics of peaks in weak lensing convergence maps is a promising tool to investigate both the properties of dark matter haloes and constrain the cosmological parameters. We study how the number of detectable peaks and its scaling with redshift depend upon the cluster dark matter halo profiles and use peak statistics to constrain the parameters of the mass - concentration (MC) relation. We investigate which constraints the Euclid mission can set on the MC coefficients also taking into account degeneracies with the cosmological parameters. To this end, we first estimate the number of peaks and its redshift distribution for different MC relations. We find that the steeper the mass dependence and the larger the normalisation, the higher is the number of detectable clusters, with the total number of peaks changing up to $40\%$ depending on the MC relation. We then perform a Fisher matrix forecast of the errors on the MC relation parameters as well as cosmological parameters. We find that peak number counts detected by Euclid can determine the normalization $A_v$, the mass $B_v$ and redshift $C_v$ slopes and intrinsic scatter $\sigma_v$ of the MC relation to an unprecedented accuracy being $\sigma(A_v)/A_v = 1\%$, $\sigma(B_v)/B_v = 4\%$, $\sigma(C_v)/C_v = 9\%$, $\sigma(\sigma_v)/\sigma_v = 1\%$ if all cosmological parameters are assumed to be known. Should we relax this severe assumption, constraints are degraded, but remarkably good results can be restored setting only some of the parameters or combining peak counts with Planck data. This precision can give insight on competing scenarios of structure formation and evolution and on the role of baryons in cluster assembling. Alternatively, for a fixed MC relation, future peaks counts can perform as well as current BAO and SNeIa when combined with Planck.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication on Astronomy & Astrophysic

Searching for galaxy clusters using the aperture mass statistics in 50 VLT fields

Application of the aperture mass (Map-) statistics provides a weak lensing method for the detection of cluster-sized dark matter halos. We present a new aperture filter function and maximise the effectiveness of the Map-statistics to detect cluster-sized halos using analytical models. We then use weak lensing mock catalogues generated from ray-tracing through N-body simulations, to analyse the effect of image treatment on the expected number density of halos. Using the Map-statistics, the aperture radius is typically several arcminutes, hence the aperture often lies partly outside a data field, consequently the signal-to-noise ratio of a halo detection decreases. We study these border effects analytically and by using mock catalogues. We find that the expected number density of halos decreases by a factor of two if the size of a field is comparable to the diameter of the aperture used. We finally report on the results of a weak lensing cluster search applying the Map-statistics to 50 randomly selected fields which were observed with FORS1 at the VLT. Altogether the 50 VLT fields cover an area of 0.64 square degrees. The I-band images were taken under excellent seeing conditions (average seeing 0.6 arcsec.) which results in a high number density of galaxies used for the weak lensing analysis (26/sq.arcmin). In five of the VLT fields, we detect a significant Map-signal which coincides with an overdensity of the light distribution. These detections are thus excellent candidates for shear-selected clusters.Comment: 23 pages, 5 tables, 24 figures, published in A&A, Sect. 3.5 and 7 are changed or altered; Fig. 11 is change

The localization of single pulse in VLBI observation

In our previous work, we propose a cross spectrum based method to extract single pulse signals from RFI contaminated data, which is originated from geodetic VLBI postprocessing. This method fully utilizes fringe phase information of the cross spectrum and hence maximizes signal power, however the localization was not discussed in that work yet. As the continuation of that work, in this paper, we further study how to localize single pulses using astrometric solving method. Assuming that the burst is a point source, we derive the burst position by solving a set of linear equations given the relation between residual delay and offset to a priori position. We find that the single pulse localization results given by both astrometric solving and radio imaging are consistent within 3 sigma level. Therefore we claim that it is possible to derive the position of a single pulse with reasonable precision based on only 3 or even 2 baselines with 4 milliseconds integration. The combination of cross spectrum based detection and the localization proposed in this work then provide a thorough solution for searching single pulse in VLBI observation. According to our calculation, our pipeline gives comparable accuracy as radio imaging pipeline. Moreover, the computational cost of our pipeline is much smaller, which makes it more practical for FRB search in regular VLBI observation. The pipeline is now publicly available and we name it as "VOLKS", which is the acronym of "VLBI Observation for frb Localization Keen Searcher".Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in A

Cosmic shear surveys

Gravitational weak shear produced by large-scale structures of the universe induces a correlated ellipticity distribution of distant galaxies. The amplitude and evolution with angular scale of the signal depend on cosmological models and can be inverted in order to constrain the power spectrum and the cosmological parameters. We present our recent analysis of 50 uncorrelated VLT fields and the very first constrains on ($\Omega_m,\sigma_8$) and the nature of primordial fluctuations based on the join analysis of present-day cosmic shear surveys.Comment: Latex, 7 pages. To appear in the ESO Proceedings ``Deep Fields'', Garching Oct 9-12, 200