Large Scale Peculiar Velocities: Effects from Superclusters

We study the gravitational influence of very large scale structures, as traced by clusters of galaxies, on the Local Group [LG] motion and the large scale flows. We derive from the distribution of Abell clusters within $300~$Mpc/h the overdensity field on a 3--D grid of spacing $5~$Mpc/h, then we solve the Poisson equation for the peculiar potential and finally obtain the peculiar velocity field. Quite interestingly, from this global solution we: i) recover within $\sim 10^o$ the direction of the LG motion in the Cosmic Microwave Background [CMB] frame, ii find that the Great Attractor itself moves wrt to the CMB frame, iii) derive $\beta_c^{-1} \equiv b_c \Omega_0^{-0.6} = 5.3 \pm 0.20$ from a preliminary comparison with the Mark~II catalog of peculiar velocities, iv) derive estimates for the bulk flow in spheres which fairly agree with the level derived from POTENT and the Spiral samples, v) find that the Lauer \& Postman [L\&P] bulk flow has too a large amplitude to be in agreement with our results.Comment: To appear in XXXth Moriond "Clustering in the Universe". Four, uuencoded, compressed (gzip -9), self unpacking postscript pages (figures included). [if you want an hardcopy of Ref.5, please send an E-mail to [email protected]

Measuring primordial non-gaussianity without cosmic variance

Non-gaussianity in the initial conditions of the universe is one of the most powerful mechanisms to discriminate among the competing theories of the early universe. Measurements using bispectrum of cosmic microwave background anisotropies are limited by the cosmic variance, i.e. available number of modes. Recent work has emphasized the possibility to probe non-gaussianity of local type using the scale dependence of large scale bias from highly biased tracers of large scale structure. However, this power spectrum method is also limited by cosmic variance, finite number of structures on the largest scales, and by the partial degeneracy with other cosmological parameters that can mimic the same effect. Here we propose an alternative method that solves both of these problems. It is based on the idea that on large scales halos are biased, but not stochastic, tracers of dark matter: by correlating a highly biased tracer of large scale structure against an unbiased tracer one eliminates the cosmic variance error, which can lead to a high signal to noise even from the structures comparable to the size of the survey. The square of error improvement on non-gaussianity parameter f_nl relative to the power spectrum method scales as Pn/2, where P and n is the power spectrum and the number density of the biased tracer, respectively. For an ideal survey out to z=2 the error reduction can be as large as a factor of seven, which should guarantee a detection of non-gaussianity from an all sky survey of this type. The improvements could be even larger if high density tracers that are sensitive to non-gaussianity can be identified and measured over a large volume.Comment: 7 page

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