Baryon Oscillations and Consistency Tests for Photometrically-Determined Redshifts of Very Faint Galaxies

Weak lensing surveys that can potentially place strong constraints on dark energy parameters can only do so if the source redshift means and error distributions are very well known. We investigate prospects for controlling errors in these quantities by exploiting their influence on the power spectra of the galaxies. Although, from the galaxy power spectra alone, sufficiently precise and simultaneous determination of redshift biases and variances is not possible, a strong consistency test is. Given the redshift error rms, galaxy power spectra can be used to determine the mean redshift of a group of galaxies to subpercent accuracy. Although galaxy power spectra cannot be used to determine the redshift error rms, they can be used to determine this rms divided by the Hubble parameter, a quantity that may be even more valuable for interpretation of cosmic shear data than the rms itself. We also show that galaxy power spectra, due to the baryonic acoustic oscillations, can potentially lead to constraints on dark energy that are competitive with those due to the cosmic shear power spectra from the same survey.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Ap

On the Three-dimensional Lattice Model

Using the restricted star-triangle relation, it is shown that the $N$-state spin integrable model on a three-dimensional lattice with spins interacting round each elementary cube of the lattice proposed by Mangazeev, Sergeev and Stroganov is a particular case of the Bazhanov-Baxter model.Comment: 8 pages, latex, 4 figure

One-point Statistics of the Cosmic Density Field in Real and Redshift Spaces with A Multiresolutional Decomposition

In this paper, we develop a method of performing the one-point statistics of a perturbed density field with a multiresolutional decomposition based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). We establish the algorithm of the one-point variable and its moments in considering the effects of Poisson sampling and selection function. We also establish the mapping between the DWT one-point statistics in redshift space and real space, i.e. the algorithm for recovering the DWT one-point statistics from the redshift distortion of bulk velocity, velocity dispersion, and selection function. Numerical tests on N-body simulation samples show that this algorithm works well on scales from a few hundreds to a few Mpc/h for four popular cold dark matter models. Taking the advantage that the DWT one-point variable is dependent on both the scale and the shape (configuration) of decomposition modes, one can design estimators of the redshift distortion parameter (beta) from combinations of DWT modes. When the non-linear redshift distortion is not negligible, the beta estimator from quadrupole-to-monopole ratio is a function of scale. This estimator would not work without adding information about the scale-dependence, such as the power-spectrum index or the real-space correlation function of the random field. The DWT beta estimators, however, do not need such extra information. Numerical tests show that the proposed DWT estimators are able to determine beta robustly with less than 15% uncertainty in the redshift range 0 < z < 3.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, ApJ accepte

Measuring Baryon Acoustic Oscillations with Millions of Supernovae

Since type Ia Supernovae (SNe) explode in galaxies, they can, in principle, be used as the same tracer of the large-scale structure as their hosts to measure baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). To realize this, one must obtain a dense integrated sampling of SNe over a large fraction of the sky, which may only be achievable photometrically with future projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The advantage of SN BAOs is that SNe have more uniform luminosities and more accurate photometric redshifts than galaxies, but the disadvantage is that they are transitory and hard to obtain in large number at high redshift. We find that a half-sky photometric SN survey to redshift z = 0.8 is able to measure the baryon signature in the SN spatial power spectrum. Although dark energy constraints from SN BAOs are weak, they can significantly improve the results from SN luminosity distances of the same data, and the combination of the two is no longer sensitive to cosmic microwave background priors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, ApJL accepte

Correlation between the Mean Matter Density and the Width of the Saturated Lyman Alpha Absorption

We report a scaling of the mean matter density with the width of the saturated Lyman alpha absorptions. This property is established using the ``pseudo-hydro'' technique (Croft et al. 1998). It provides a constraint for the inversion of the Lyman alpha forest, which encounters difficulty in the saturated region. With a Gaussian density profile and the scaling relation, a simple inversion of the simulated Lyman alpha forests shows that the one-dimensional mass power spectrum is well recovered on scales above 2 Mpc/h, or roughly k < 0.03 s/km, at z=3. The recovery underestimates the power on small scales, but improvement is possible with a more sophisticated algorithm.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, replaced by the version after proo

Identifying Hidden Visits from Sparse Call Detail Record Data

Despite a large body of literature on trip inference using call detail record (CDR) data, a fundamental understanding of their limitations is lacking. In particular, because of the sparse nature of CDR data, users may travel to a location without being revealed in the data, which we refer to as a "hidden visit". The existence of hidden visits hinders our ability to extract reliable information about human mobility and travel behavior from CDR data. In this study, we propose a data fusion approach to obtain labeled data for statistical inference of hidden visits. In the absence of complementary data, this can be accomplished by extracting labeled observations from more granular cellular data access records, and extracting features from voice call and text messaging records. The proposed approach is demonstrated using a real-world CDR dataset of 3 million users from a large Chinese city. Logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, and gradient boosting are used to infer whether a hidden visit exists during a displacement observed from CDR data. The test results show significant improvement over the naive no-hidden-visit rule, which is an implicit assumption adopted by most existing studies. Based on the proposed model, we estimate that over 10% of the displacements extracted from CDR data involve hidden visits. The proposed data fusion method offers a systematic statistical approach to inferring individual mobility patterns based on telecommunication records

High-Q-factor Al [subscript 2]O[subscript 3] micro-trench cavities integrated with silicon nitride waveguides on silicon

We report on the design and performance of high-Q integrated optical micro-trench cavities on silicon. The microcavities are co-integrated with silicon nitride bus waveguides and fabricated using wafer-scale silicon-photonics-compatible processing steps. The amorphous aluminum oxide resonator material is deposited via sputtering in a single straightforward post-processing step. We examine the theoretical and experimental optical properties of the aluminum oxide micro-trench cavities for different bend radii, film thicknesses and near-infrared wavelengths and demonstrate experimental Q factors of > 10[superscript 6]. We propose that this high-Q micro-trench cavity design can be applied to incorporate a wide variety of novel microcavity materials, including rare-earth-doped films for microlasers, into wafer-scale silicon photonics platforms

Ly alpha flux power spectrum and its covariance

We analyse the flux power spectrum and its covariance using simulated Lyα forests. We find that pseudo-hydro techniques are good approximations of hydrodynamical simulations at high redshift. However, the pseudo-hydro techniques fail at low redshift because they are insufficient for characterizing some components of the low-redshift intergalactic medium, notably the warm–hot intergalactic medium. Hence, to use the low-redshift Lyα flux power spectrum to constrain cosmology, one would need realistic hydrodynamical simulations. By comparing (one-dimensional) mass statistics with flux statistics, we show that the non-linear transform between density and flux quenches the fluctuations so that the flux power spectrum is much less sensitive to cosmological parameters than the one-dimensional mass power spectrum. The covariance of the flux power spectrum is nearly Gaussian. As such, the uncertainties of the underlying mass power spectrum could still be large, even though the flux power spectrum can be precisely determined from a small number of lines of sight

Tunable singlet-triplet splitting in a few-electron Si/SiGe quantum dot

We measure the excited-state spectrum of a Si/SiGe quantum dot as a function of in-plane magnetic field, and we identify the spin of the lowest three eigenstates in an effective two-electron regime. The singlet-triplet splitting is an essential parameter describing spin qubits, and we extract this splitting from the data. We find it to be tunable by lateral displacement of the dot, which is realized by changing two gate voltages on opposite sides of the device. We present calculations showing the data are consistent with a spectrum in which the first excited state of the dot is a valley-orbit state.Comment: 4 pages with 3 figure