# The Impact of Microlensing on the Standardisation of Strongly Lensed Type Ia Supernovae [CEA]

We investigate the effect of microlensing on the standardisation of strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (GLSNe Ia). We present predictions for the amount of scatter induced by microlensing across a range of plausible strong lens macromodels. We find that lensed images in regions of low convergence, shear and stellar density are standardisable, where the microlensing scatter is comparable to the intrinsic dispersion of a typical SN Ia. These standardiable configurations correspond to the outer image of an asymmetric double for lenses with large Einstein radii. Quadruple image systems, symmetric doubles and small Einstein radii lenses are not standardisable. We apply our model to the recently discovered GLSN Ia iPTF16geu and find that the large discrepancy between the observed flux and the macromodel predictions from More et al. 2016 cannot be explained by microlensing alone. Using the mock GLSNe Ia catalogue of Goldstein et al. 2017, we predict that ~22% of GLSNe Ia discovered by LSST will be standardisable, with a median Einstein radius of 0.9 arcseconds and a median time-delay of 41 days. By breaking the mass-sheet degeneracy the full LSST GLSNe Ia sample will be able to detect systematics in H0 at the 0.5% level.

M. Foxley-Marrable, T. Collett, G. Vernardos, et. al.
Fri, 23 Feb 18
6/64

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# Looking at cosmic near-infrared background radiation anisotropies [CEA]

The cosmic infrared background (CIB) contains emissions accumulated over the entire history of the Universe, including from objects inaccessible to individual telescopic studies. The near-IR (~1-10 mic) part of the CIB, and its fluctuations, reflects emissions from nucleosynthetic sources and gravitationally accreting black holes (BHs). If known galaxies are removed to sufficient depths the source-subtracted CIB fluctuations at near-IR can reveal sources present in the first-stars-era and possibly new stellar populations at more recent times. This review discusses the recent progress in this newly emerging field which identified, with new data and methodology, significant source-subtracted CIB fluctuations substantially in excess of what can be produced by remaining known galaxies. The CIB fluctuations further appear coherent with unresolved cosmic X-ray background (CXB) indicating a very high fraction of BHs among the new sources producing the CIB fluctuations. These observations have led to intensive theoretical efforts to explain the measurements and their properties. While current experimental configurations have limitations in decisively probing these theories, their potentially remarkable implications will be tested in the upcoming CIB measurements with the ESA’s Euclid dark energy mission. We describe the goals and methodologies of LIBRAE (Looking at Infrared Background Radiation with Euclid), a NASA-selected project for CIB science with Euclid, which has the potential for transforming the field into a new area of precision cosmology.

A. Kashlinsky, R. Arendt, F. Atrio-Barandela, et. al.
Fri, 23 Feb 18
21/64

Comments: Reviews of Modern Physics, to appear

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# Mitigating Foreground Biases in CMB Lensing Reconstruction Using Cleaned Gradients [CEA]

Reconstructed maps of the lensing convergence of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will play a major role in precision cosmology in coming years. CMB lensing maps will enable calibration of the masses of high-redshift galaxy clusters and will yield precise measurements of the growth of cosmic structure through cross-correlations with galaxy surveys. During the next decade, CMB lensing reconstruction will rely heavily on temperature data, rather than polarization, thus necessitating a detailed understanding of biases due to extragalactic foregrounds. In the near term, the most significant bias among these is that due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect. Moreover, high-resolution observations will be available at only a few frequencies, making full foreground cleaning challenging. In this paper, we demonstrate a solution to the foreground bias problem that involves cleaning only the large-scale gradients of the CMB temperature map. We show that the data necessary for tSZ-bias-free CMB lensing maps already exist in the form of large-scale measurements of the CMB across multiple frequencies by the Planck and WMAP satellite experiments. Specifically, we show that the bias to halo masses inferred from CMB lensing is eliminated by the utilization of clean gradients obtained from multi-frequency component separation involving Planck and WMAP data, and that special lensing maps for galaxy cross-correlations can be prepared with only a small penalty in signal-to-noise while requiring no masking, in-painting, modeling, or simulation effort for the tSZ bias. While we focus on cross-correlations, we also show that gradient cleaning can mitigate biases to the CMB lensing autospectrum that arise from the presence of foregrounds in temperature and polarization with minimal loss of signal-to-noise.

Fri, 23 Feb 18
22/64

Comments: 12 pages, 5 figures, to be submitted to PRD

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# Detection significance of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations peaks in galaxy and quasar clustering [CEA]

We compare our analysis of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) feature in the correlation functions of SDSS BOSS DR12 LOWZ and CMASS galaxy samples with the findings of arXiv:1509.06371v2. Using subsets of the data we obtain an empirical estimate of the errors on the correlation functions which are in agreement with the simulated errors of arXiv:1509.06371v2. We find that the significance of BAO detection is the quantity most sensitive to the choice of the fitting range with the CMASS value decreasing from 8{\sigma} to 5.3{\sigma} in some cases. Via an F-ratio test, we demonstrate that the A(s) nuisance parameters play a significant role when fitting CMASS and LOWZ correlation functions with the fiducial {\Lambda}CDM model. Although our measurements of DV are in reasonable agreement with those of arXiv:1509.06371v2, we note unexplained issues when fitting with their full covariance which may reduce their estimate of BAO peak significance. We extend our BAO analysis to higher redshifts by fitting to the weighted mean of 2QDESp, SDSS DR5 UNIFORM, 2QZ and 2SLAQ quasar correlation functions, obtaining a 7.7% measurement compared to 3.9% achieved by eBOSS DR14. The larger error on quasar correlation functions implies a smaller role for nuisance parameters in providing a good fit. Although the eBOSS BAO peak significance is only at the 1.4-2.8{\sigma} level, we demonstrate that high-redshift quasars play a vital role in “standard ruler” BAO cosmology.

Fri, 23 Feb 18
31/64

Comments: 20 pages, 20 figures, submitted to MNRAS

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# Light Primordial Exotic Compact Objects as All Dark Matter [CEA]

The radiation emitted by horizonless exotic compact objects (ECOs), such as wormholes, 2-2-holes, fuzzballs, gravastars, boson stars, collapsed polymers, superspinars etc., is expected to be strongly suppressed when compared to the radiation of black holes. If large primordial curvature fluctuations collapse into such objects instead of black holes, they do not evaporate or evaporate much slower than black holes and could thus constitute all of the dark matter with masses below $M < 10^{-16}M_\odot.$ We re-evaluate the relevant experimental constraints for light ECOs in this mass range and show that very large new parameter space down to ECO masses $M\sim 10\,{\rm TeV}$ opens up for light primordial dark matter. A new dedicated experimental program is needed to test this mass range of primordial dark matter.

M. Raidal, S. Solodukhin, V. Vaskonen, et. al.
Fri, 23 Feb 18
40/64

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# Gravitational Waves from Binary Mergers of Sub-solar Mass Dark Black Holes [CEA]

We explore the possible spectrum of binary mergers of sub-solar mass black holes formed out of dark matter particles interacting via a dark electromagnetism. We estimate the properties of these dark black holes by assuming that their formation process is parallel to Population-III star formation; except that dark molecular cooling can yield smaller opacity limit. We estimate the binary coalescence rates for the Advanced LIGO and Einstein telescope, and find that scenarios compatible with all current constraints could produce dark black holes at rates high enough for detection by Advanced LIGO.

S. Shandera, D. Jeong and H. Gebhardt
Fri, 23 Feb 18
53/64

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# Cubic Halo Bias in Eulerian and Lagrangian Space [CEA]

Predictions of the next-to-leading order, i.e. one-loop, halo power spectra depend on local and non-local bias parameters up to cubic order. The linear bias parameter can be estimated from the large scale limit of the halo-matter power spectrum, and the second order bias parameters from the large scale, tree-level, bispectrum. Cubic operators would naturally be quantified using the tree-level trispectrum. As the latter is computationally expensive, we extent the quadratic field method proposed in Schmittfull et al. 2014 to cubic fields in order to estimate cubic bias parameters. We cross-correlate a basis set of cubic bias operators with the halo field and express the result in terms of the cross-spectra of these operators in order to cancel cosmic variance. We obtain significant detections of local and non-local cubic bias parameters, which are partially in tension with predictions based on local Lagrangian bias schemes. We directly measure the Lagrangian bias parameters of the protohaloes associated with our halo sample and clearly detect a non-local quadratic term in Lagrangian space. We do not find a clear detection of non-local cubic Lagrangian terms for low mass bins, but there is some mild evidence for their presence for the highest mass bin. While the method presented here focuses on cubic bias parameters, the approach could also be applied to quantifications of cubic primordial non-Gaussianity.

M. Abidi and T. Baldauf
Thu, 22 Feb 18
16/60