Exploring novel probes and methods for cosmology

Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:15 am - 11:15 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Astronomy Seminar Series

Elena Massara, WCA Postdoctoral fellow

The values of neutrinos’ masses and the force driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe are some of the unknown in physics. In this talk I will discuss fairly new probes—cosmic voids and marked power spectra—and a novel method—emulator with simulations on the fly—to extract cosmological information from future surveys, which will allow to understand the nature of neutrinos and dark energy. I will discuss why cosmic voids are special laboratories to study neutrinos and motivate the use of marked power spectra as cosmological probes. I will then present a fisher matrix analysis performed with the Quijote simulations to estimate the constraining power of these probes. Finally, I will talk about the design of a new emulator for the galaxy power spectrum, which we have coupled to a novel optimizer. Those represent a novel method to contain the growth rate of structure in future galaxy surveys.