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  1. ABSTRACT

    We present cosmological constraints derived from peak counts, minimum counts, and the angular power spectrum of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first-year (HSC Y1) weak lensing shear catalogue. Weak lensing peak and minimum counts contain non-Gaussian information and hence are complementary to the conventional two-point statistics in constraining cosmology. In this work, we forward-model the three summary statistics and their dependence on cosmology, using a suite of N-body simulations tailored to the HSC Y1 data. We investigate systematic and astrophysical effects including intrinsic alignments, baryon feedback, multiplicative bias, and photometric redshift uncertainties. We mitigate the impact of these systematics by applying cuts on angular scales, smoothing scales, signal-to-noise ratio bins, and tomographic redshift bins. By combining peaks, minima, and the power spectrum, assuming a flat-ΛCDM model, we obtain $S_{8} \equiv \sigma _8\sqrt{\Omega _m/0.3}= 0.810^{+0.022}_{-0.026}$, a 35 per cent tighter constraint than that obtained from the angular power spectrum alone. Our results are in agreement with other studies using HSC weak lensing shear data, as well as with Planck 2018 cosmology and recent CMB lensing constraints from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope.

     
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  2. ABSTRACT

    We have performed targeted searches of known extragalactic transient events at millimetre wavelengths using nine seasons (2013–2021) of 98, 150, and 229 GHz Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) observations that mapped ∼40 per cent of the sky for most of the data volume. Our data cover 88 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), 12 tidal disruption events (TDEs), and 203 other transients, including supernovae (SNe). We stack our ACT observations to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the maps. In all cases but one, we do not detect these transients in the ACT data. The single candidate detection (event AT2019ppm), seen at ∼5σ significance in our data, appears to be due to active galactic nuclei activity in the host galaxy coincident with a transient alert. For each source in our search we provide flux upper limits. For example, the medians for the 95 per cent confidence upper limits at 98 GHz are 15, 18, and 16 mJy for GRBs, SNe, and TDEs, respectively, in the first month after discovery. The projected sensitivity of future wide-area cosmic microwave background surveys should be sufficient to detect many of these events using the methods described in this paper.

     
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  3. Abstract

    We present theDustFilamentscode, a full-sky model for the millimeter Galactic emission of thermal dust. Our model, composed of millions of filaments that are imperfectly aligned with the magnetic field, is able to reproduce the main features of the dust angular power spectra at 353 GHz as measured by the Planck mission. Our model is made up of a population of filaments with sizes following a Pareto distributionLa2.445, with an axis ratio between short and long semiaxesϵ∼ 0.16 and an angle of magnetic field misalignment with a dispersion rms(θLH) = 10°. On large scales, our model follows a Planck-based template. On small scales, our model produces spectra that behave like power laws up to∼ 4000 or smaller scales by considering even smaller filaments, limited only by computing power. We can produce any number of Monte Carlo realizations of small-scale Galactic dust. Our model will allow tests of how the small-scale non-Gaussianity affects CMB weak lensing and the consequences for the measurement of primordial gravitational waves or relativistic light relic species. Our model also can generate frequency decorrelation on the modified blackbody spectrum of dust and is freely adjustable to different levels of decorrelation. This can be used to test the performance of component separation methods and the impact of frequency spectrum residuals on primordialB-mode surveys. The filament density we paint in the sky is also able to reproduce the general level of non-Gaussianities measured by Minkowski functionals in the Planck 353 GHz channel map.

     
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  4. Abstract Diverse astrophysical observations suggest the existence of cold dark matter that interacts only gravitationally with radiation and ordinary baryonic matter. Any nonzero coupling between dark matter and baryons would provide a significant step towards understanding the particle nature of dark matter. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide constraints on such a coupling that complement laboratory searches. In this work we place upper limits on a variety of models for dark matter elastic scattering with protons and electrons by combining large-scale CMB data from the Planck satellite with small-scale information from Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) DR4 data. In the case of velocity-independent scattering, we obtain bounds on the interaction cross section for protons that are 40% tighter than previous constraints from the CMB anisotropy. For some models with velocity-dependent scattering we find best-fitting cross sections with a 2 σ deviation from zero, but these scattering models are not statistically preferred over ΛCDM in terms of model selection. 
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  5. Abstract

    In the context of cosmic microwave background data analysis, we study the solution to the equation that transforms scanning data into a map. As originally suggested in “messenger” methods for solving linear systems, we split the noise covariance into uniform and nonuniform parts and adjust their relative weights during the iterative solution. With simulations, we study mock instrumental data with different noise properties, and find that this “cooling” or perturbative approach is particularly effective when there is significant low-frequency noise in the timestream. In such cases, a conjugate gradient algorithm applied to this modified system converges faster and to a higher fidelity solution than the standard conjugate gradient approach. We give an analytic estimate for the parameter that controls how gradually the linear system should change during the course of the solution.

     
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  6. Abstract

    Contamination by polarized foregrounds is one of the biggest challenges for future polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys and the potential detection of primordialB-modes. Future experiments, such as Simons Observatory (SO) and CMB-S4, will aim at very deep observations in relatively small (fsky∼ 0.1) areas of the sky. In this work, we investigate the forecasted performance, as a function of the survey field location on the sky, for regions over the full sky, balancing between polarized foreground avoidance and foreground component separation modeling needs. To do this, we simulate observations by an SO-like experiment and measure the error bar on the detection of the tensor-to-scalar ratio,σ(r), with a pipeline that includes a parametric component separation method, the Correlated Component Analysis, and the use of the Fisher information matrix. We forecast the performance over 192 survey areas covering the full sky and also for optimized low-foreground regions. We find that modeling the spectral energy distribution of foregrounds is the most important factor, and any mismatch will result in residuals and bias in the primordialB-modes. At these noise levels,σ(r) is not especially sensitive to the level of foreground contamination, provided the survey targets the least-contaminated regions of the sky close to the Galactic poles.

     
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  9. Abstract

    We present cosmological constraints from a gravitational lensing mass map covering 9400 deg2reconstructed from measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) from 2017 to 2021. In combination with measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations and big bang nucleosynthesis, we obtain the clustering amplitudeσ8= 0.819 ± 0.015 at 1.8% precision,S8σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5=0.840±0.028, and the Hubble constantH0= (68.3 ± 1.1) km s−1Mpc−1at 1.6% precision. A joint constraint with Planck CMB lensing yieldsσ8= 0.812 ± 0.013,S8σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.5=0.831±0.023, andH0= (68.1 ± 1.0) km s−1Mpc−1. These measurements agree with ΛCDM extrapolations from the CMB anisotropies measured by Planck. We revisit constraints from the KiDS, DES, and HSC galaxy surveys with a uniform set of assumptions and find thatS8from all three are lower than that from ACT+Planck lensing by levels ranging from 1.7σto 2.1σ. This motivates further measurements and comparison, not just between the CMB anisotropies and galaxy lensing but also between CMB lensing probingz∼ 0.5–5 on mostly linear scales and galaxy lensing atz∼ 0.5 on smaller scales. We combine with CMB anisotropies to constrain extensions of ΛCDM, limiting neutrino masses to ∑mν< 0.13 eV (95% c.l.), for example. We describe the mass map and related data products that will enable a wide array of cross-correlation science. Our results provide independent confirmation that the universe is spatially flat, conforms with general relativity, and is described remarkably well by the ΛCDM model, while paving a promising path for neutrino physics with lensing from upcoming ground-based CMB surveys.

     
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