arXiv subjects

Alejandro Aviles

Publications and source records attributed to Alejandro Aviles.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Overview of the Instrumentation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has embarked on an ambitious five-year survey to explore the nature of dark energy with spectroscopy of 40 million galaxies and quasars. DESI will determine precise redshifts and employ the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation method to measure distances from the nearby universe to z > 3.5, as well as measure the growth of structure and probe potential modifications to general relativity. In this paper we describe the significant instrumentation we developed for the DESI survey. The new instrumentation includes a wide-field, 3.2-deg diameter prime-focus corrector that focuses the light onto 5020 robotic fiber positioners on the 0.812 m diameter, aspheric focal surface. The positioners and their fibers are divided among ten wedge-shaped petals. Each petal is connected to one of ten spectrographs via a contiguous, high-efficiency, nearly 50 m fiber cable bundle. The ten spectrographs each use a pair of dichroics to split the light into three channels that together record the light from 360 - 980 nm with a resolution of 2000 to 5000. We describe the science requirements, technical requirements on the instrumentation, and management of the project. DESI was installed at the 4-m Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak, and we also describe the facility upgrades to prepare for DESI and the installation and functional verification process. DESI has achieved all of its performance goals, and the DESI survey began in May 2021. Some performance highlights include RMS positioner accuracy better than 0.1", SNR per \sqrtÅ > 0.5 for a z > 2 quasar with flux 0.28e-17 erg/s/cm^2/A at 380 nm in 4000s, and median SNR = 7 of the [OII] doublet at 8e-17 erg/s/cm^2 in a 1000s exposure for emission line galaxies at z = 1.4 - 1.6. We conclude with highlights from the on-sky validation and commissioning of the instrument, key successes, and lessons learned. (abridged)

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Clustering in Massive Neutrino Cosmologies via Eulerian Perturbation Theory

We introduce an Eulerian Perturbation Theory to study the clustering of tracers for cosmologies in the presence of massive neutrinos. Our approach is based on mapping recently-obtained Lagrangian Perturbation Theory results to the Eulerian framework. We add Effective Field Theory counterterms, IR-resummations and a biasing scheme to compute the one-loop redshift-space power spectrum. To assess our predictions, we compare the power spectrum multipoles against synthetic halo catalogues from the Quijote simulations, finding excellent agreement on scales $k\lesssim 0.25 \,h \text{Mpc}^{-1}$. One can obtain the same fitting accuracy using higher wave-numbers, but then the theory fails to give a correct estimation of the linear bias parameter. We further discuss the implications for the tree-level bispectrum. Finally, calculating loop corrections is computationally costly, hence we derive an accurate approximation wherein we retain only the main features of the kernels, as produced by changes to the growth rate. As a result, we show how FFTLog methods can be used to further accelerate the loop computations with these reduced kernels.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Testing modified gravity theories with marked statistics

In the last two decades, Modified Gravity (MG) models have been proposed to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe. However, one of the main difficulties these theories face is that they must reduce to General Relativity (GR) at sufficiently high energy densities, such as those found in the solar system. To achieve this, MG theories typically employ so-called screening mechanisms: nonlinear effects that bring them to GR at the appropriate limits. For this reason, low-energy regions where the screenings do not operate efficiently, such as cosmic voids, are identified as ideal laboratories for testing GR. Hence, the use of marked statistics that up-weight low energy densities have been proposed for being implemented with data from future galaxy surveys. In this proceeding note, we show how to construct theoretical templates for such statistics and test their accuracy with the use of N-body simulations.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

Testing the theory of gravity with DESI: estimators, predictions and simulation requirements

Shortly after its discovery, General Relativity (GR) was applied to predict the behavior of our Universe on the largest scales, and later became the foundation of modern cosmology. Its validity has been verified on a range of scales and environments from the Solar system to merging black holes. However, experimental confirmations of GR on cosmological scales have so far lacked the accuracy one would hope for -- its applications on those scales being largely based on extrapolation and its validity sometimes questioned in the shadow of the unexpected cosmic acceleration. Future astronomical instruments surveying the distribution and evolution of galaxies over substantial portions of the observable Universe, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), will be able to measure the fingerprints of gravity and their statistical power will allow strong constraints on alternatives to GR. In this paper, based on a set of $N$-body simulations and mock galaxy catalogs, we study the predictions of a number of traditional and novel estimators beyond linear redshift distortions in two well-studied modified gravity models, chameleon $f(R)$ gravity and a braneworld model, and the potential of testing these deviations from GR using DESI. These estimators employ a wide array of statistical properties of the galaxy and the underlying dark matter field, including two-point and higher-order statistics, environmental dependence, redshift space distortions and weak lensing. We find that they hold promising power for testing GR to unprecedented precision. The major future challenge is to make realistic, simulation-based mock galaxy catalogs for both GR and alternative models to fully exploit the statistic power of the DESI survey and to better understand the impact of key systematic effects. Using these, we identify future simulation and analysis needs for gravity tests using DESI.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Redshift space power spectrum beyond Einstein-de Sitter kernels

We develop a framework to compute the redshift space power spectrum (PS), with kernels beyond Einstein-de Sitter (EdS), that can be applied to a wide variety of generalized cosmologies. We build upon a formalism that was recently employed for standard cosmology in Chen, Vlah & White (2020), and utilize an expansion of the density-weighted velocity moment generating function that explicitly separates the magnitude of the $k$-modes and their angle to the line-of-sight direction dependencies. We compute the PS for matter and biased tracers to 1-loop Perturbation Theory (PT) and show that the expansion has a correct infrared and ultraviolet behavior, free of unwanted divergences. We also add Effective Field Theory (EFT) counterterms, necessary to account for small-scale contributions to PT, and employ an IR-resummation prescription to properly model the smearing of the BAO due to large scale bulk flows within Standard-PT. To demonstrate the applicability of our formalism, we apply it on the $Λ$CDM and the Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ models, and compare our numerical results against the ELEPHANT suite of $N$-body simulations, finding very good agreement up to $k= 0.27\, \text{Mpc}^{-1} h$ at $z=0.5$ for the first three non-vanishing Legendre multipoles of the PS. To our knowledge, the model presented in this work is the most accurate theoretical EFT-PT for modified gravity to date, being the only one that accounts for beyond linear local biasing in redshift-space. Hence, we argue our RSD modeling is a promising tool to construct theoretical templates in order to test deviations from $Λ$CDM using real data obtained from the next stage of cosmological surveys such as DESI and LSST.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Modeling the Marked Spectrum of Matter and Biased Tracers in Real- and Redshift-Space

We present the one-loop perturbation theory for the power spectrum of the marked density field of matter and biased tracers in real- and redshift-space. The statistic has been shown to yield impressive constraints on cosmological parameters; to exploit this, we require an accurate and computationally inexpensive theoretical model. Comparison with $N$-body simulations demonstrates that linear theory fails on all scales, but inclusion of one-loop Effective Field Theory terms gives a substantial improvement, with $\sim 5\%$ accuracy at $z = 1$. The expansion is less convergent in redshift-space (achieving $\sim 10\%$ accuracy), but there are significant improvements for biased tracers due to the freedom in the bias coefficients. The large-scale theory contains non-negligible contributions from all perturbative orders; we suggest a reorganization of the theory that contains all terms relevant on large-scales, discussing both its explicit form at one-loop and structure at infinite-loop. This motivates a low-$k$ correction term, leading to a model that is sub-percent accurate on large scales, albeit with the inclusion of two (three) free coefficients in real- (redshift-)space. We further consider the effects of massive neutrinos, showing that beyond-EdS corrections to the perturbative kernels are negligible in practice. It remains to see whether the purported gains in cosmological parameters remain valid for biased tracers and can be captured by the theoretical model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Impact of cosmological signatures in two-point statistics beyond the linear regime

Some beyond $Λ$CDM cosmological models have dark-sector energy densities that suffer phase transitions. Fluctuations entering the horizon during such a transition can receive enhancements that ultimately show up as a distinctive bump in the power spectrum relative to a model with no phase transition. In this work, we study the non-linear evolution of such signatures in the matter power spectrum and correlation function using N-body simulations, perturbation theory and HMcode - a halo-model based method. We focus on modelling the response, computed as the ratio of statistics between a model containing a bump and one without it, rather than in the statistics themselves. Instead of working with a specific theoretical model, we inject a parametric family of Gaussian bumps into otherwise standard $Λ$CDM spectra. We find that even when the primordial bump is located at linear scales, non-linearities tend to produce a second bump at smaller scales. This effect is understood within the halo model due to a more efficient halo formation. In redshift space these nonlinear signatures are partially erased because of the damping along the line-of-sight direction produced by non-coherent motions of particles at small scales. In configuration space, the bump modulates the correlation function reflecting as oscillations in the response, as it is clear in linear Eulerian theory; however, they become damped because large scale coherent flows have some tendency to occupy regions more depleted of particles. This mechanism is explained within Lagrangian Perturbation Theory and well captured by our simulations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Cosmological signatures of a Rapid Diluted Energy Density

We study the cosmological signatures of having extra energy density, $ρ_{ex}$, beyond the $Λ$CDM model that dilutes rapidly, faster than radiation, at a scale factor $a_c$ with a corresponding mode $k_c=a_c H(a_c)$ crossing the horizon at that time. These types of models are motivated by phase transitions of the underlying elementary particles, for example the creation of protons and neutrons from almost massless quarks or the recently proposed Bound Dark Energy model. The rapidly dilution of $ρ_{ex}$ leaves distinctive imprints in the Universe not only in the expansion history with a clear impact on the acoustic scale, $r_s(a_cc)$, and angular distances, $D_A(a)$, but also in the matter and CMB power spectra. The rapidly diluted energy density $ρ_{ex}$, (RDED) generates characteristic signatures that can be observed with current and future precision cosmological data. In particular, we find a bump in the matter power spectrum compared to the standard $Λ$CDM. We identify the amplitude, width, and time scale of the bump to the physical properties of the transition. We study these effects with linear theory, standard perturbation theory, and the correlated impact on cosmological distances, allowing for independent measurements of these extensions of the standard $Λ$CDM model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

A Lagrangian Perturbation Theory in the presence of massive neutrinos

We develop a Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (LPT) framework to study the clustering of cold dark matter (CDM) in cosmologies with massive neutrinos. We follow the trajectories of CDM particles with Lagrangian displacements fields up to third order in perturbation theory. Once the neutrinos become non-relativistic, their density fluctuations are modeled as being proportional to the CDM density fluctuations, with a scale-dependent proportionality factor. This yields a gravitational back-reaction that introduces additional scales to the linear growth function, which is accounted for in the higher order LPT kernels. Through non-linear mappings from Eulerian to Lagrangian frames, we ensure that our theory has a well behaved large scale behavior free of unwanted UV divergences, which are common when neutrino and CDM densities are not treated on an equal footing, and in resummation schemes that manifestly break Galilean invariance. We use our theory to construct correlation functions for both the underlying matter field, as well as for biased tracers using Convolution-LPT. Redshift-space distortions effects are modeled using the Gaussian Streaming Model. When comparing our analytical results to simulated data from the Quijote simulation suite, we find good accuracy down to $r=20 \,\text{Mpc} \, h^{-1}$ at redshift $z=0.5$, for the real space and redshift space monopole particle correlation functions with no free parameters. The same accuracy is reached for the redshift space quadrupole if we additionally consider an effective field theory parameter that shifts the pairwise velocity dispersion. For modeling the correlation functions of tracers we adopt a simple Lagrangian biasing scheme with only density and curvature operators, which we find sufficient to reach down to $r=20 \,\text{Mpc} \, h^{-1}$ when comparing to simulated halos.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Effects of Dark Energy anisotropic stress on the matter power spectrum

We study the effects of dark energy (DE) anisotropic stress on features of the matter power spectrum (PS). We employ the Parametrized Post-Friedmannian (PPF) formalism to emulate an effective DE, and model its anisotropic stress properties through a two-parameter equation that governs its overall amplitude ($g_0$) and transition scale ($c_g$). For the background cosmology, we consider different equations of state to model DE including a constant $w_0$ parameter, and models that provide thawing (CPL) and freezing (nCPL) behaviors. We first constrain these parameters by using the Pantheon, BAO, $H_0$ and CMB Planck data. Then, we analyze the role played by these parameters in the linear PS. In order for the anisotropic stress not to provoke deviations larger than $10\%$ and $5\%$ with respect to the $Λ$CDM PS at $k \sim 0.01 \,h/\text{Mpc}$, the parameters have to be in the range $-0.30< g_0 < 0.32$, $0 \leq c_g^2 < 0.01$ and $-0.15 < g_0 < 0.16$, $0 \leq c_g^2 < 0.01$, respectively. Additionally, we compute the leading nonlinear corrections to the PS using standard perturbation theory in real and redshift space, showing that the differences with respect to the $Λ$CDM are enhanced, especially for the quadrupole and hexadecapole RSD multipoles.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

An accurate perturbative approach to redshift space clustering of biased tracers in modified gravity

We extend the scale-dependent Gaussian Streaming Model (GSM) to produce analytical predictions for the anisotropic redshift-space correlation function for biased tracers in modified gravity models. Employing the Convolution Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (CLPT) re-summation scheme, with a local Lagrangian bias schema provided by the peak-background split formalism, we predict the necessary ingredients that enter the GSM, the real-space halo pairwise velocity and the pairwise velocity dispersion. We further consider effective field theory contributions to the pairwise velocity dispersion in order to model correctly its large scale behavior. We apply our method on two widely-considered modified gravity models, the chameleon-screened f(R) Hu-Sawicki model and the nDGP Vainshtein model and compare our predictions against state-of-the-art N-body simulations for these models. We demonstrate that the GSM approach to predict the monopole and the quadrupole of the redshift-space correlation function for halos, gives very good agreement with the simulation data, for a wide range of screening mechanisms, levels of screening and halo masses at z=0.5 and z=1. Our work shows the applicability of the GSM, for cosmologies beyond GR, demonstrating that it can serve as a powerful predictive tool for the next stage of cosmological surveys like DESI, Euclid, LSST and WFIRST.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

Marked correlation functions in perturbation theory

We develop perturbation theory approaches to model the marked correlation function constructed to up-weight low density regions of the Universe, which might help distinguish modified gravity models from the standard cosmology model based on general relativity. Working within Convolution Lagrangian Perturbation Theory, we obtain that weighted correlation functions are expressible as double convolution integrals that we approximate using a combination of Eulerian and Lagrangian schemes. We find that different approaches agree within 1$\%$ on quasi non-linear scales. Compared with {\it N}-body simulations, the perturbation theory is found to provide accurate predictions for the marked correlation function of dark matter fields, dark matter halos as well as Halo Occupation Distribution galaxies down to $30$ Mpc/h. These analytic approaches help to understand the degeneracy between the mark and the galaxy bias and find a way to maximize the differences among various cosmological models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Screenings in Modified Gravity: a perturbative approach

We present a formalism to study screening mechanisms in modified theories of gravity via perturbative methods in different cosmological scenarios. We consider Einstein frame posed theories that are recast as Jordan frame theories, where a known formalism is employed, though the resulting non-linearities of the Klein-Gordon equation acquire an explicit coupling between matter and the scalar field, which is not present in Jordan frame theories. The obtained growth functions are then separated in screening and non-screened contributions to facilitate its analysis. This allows us to compare several theoretical models and to recognize patterns which can be used to differentiate models and their screening mechanisms. In particular, we find anti-screening features in the Symmetron model. In opposition, chameleon type theories, both in the Jordan and in the Einstein frame, always present a screening behaviour. Up to third order in perturbation, we find no anti-screening behaviour in theories with a Vainshtein mechanism, such as the DGP and the cubic Galileon.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Nonlinear evolution of initially biased tracers in modified gravity

In this work we extend the perturbation theory for modified gravity (MG) in two main aspects. First, the construction of matter overdensities from Lagrangian displacement fields is shown to hold in a general framework, allowing us to find Standard Perturbation Theory (SPT) kernels from known Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (LPT) kernels. We then develop a theory of biased tracers for generalized cosmologies, extending already existing formalisms for $Λ$CDM. We present the correlation function in Convolution-LPT and the power spectrum in SPT for $Λ$CDM, $f(R)$ Hu-Sawicky, and DGP braneworld models. Our formalism can be applied to many generalized cosmologies and to facilitate it, we are making public a code to compute these statistics. We further study the relaxation of bias with the use of a simple model and of excursion set theory, showing that in general the bias parameters have smaller values in MG than in General Relativity.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Renormalization of Lagrangian bias via spectral parameters

We extend the definition of Lagrangian local bias proposed by Matsubara (2008) to include curvature and higher-derivative bias operators. Evolution of initially biased tracers using perturbation theory (PT) generates multivariate bias parameters as soon as nonlinear fluctuations become important. We present a procedure that reparametrize a set of spectral parameters, the arguments of the Fourier transformed Lagrangian bias function, from which multivariate renormalized biases can be derived at any order in bias expansion and PT. We find our method simpler than previous renormalization schemes because it only relies on the definition of bias, fixed from the beginning, and in one equation relating renormalized and unrenormalized spectral parameters. We also show that our multivariate biases can be obtained within the peak background split framework, in that sense this work extends that of Schmidt, Jeong and Desjacques (2013); however, we restrict our method to Gaussian initial conditions. Non-linear evolution also leads to the appearance of products of correlators evaluated at the same point, commonly named contact terms, yielding divergent contributions to the power spectrum, in this work we present an explicit method to remove these divergences by introducing stochastic fields.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Lagrangian perturbation theory for modified gravity

We present a formalism to compute Lagrangian displacement fields for a wide range of cosmologies in the context of perturbation theory up to third order. We emphasize the case of theories with scale dependent gravitational strengths, such as chameleons, but our formalism can be accommodated to other modified gravity theories. In the non-linear regime two qualitative features arise. One, as is well known, is that nonlinearities lead to a screening of the force mediated by the scalar field. The second is a consequence of the transformation of the Klein-Gordon equation from Eulerian to Lagrangian coordinates, producing frame-lagging terms that are important especially at large scales, and if not considered, the theory does not reduce to the $Λ$CDM model in that limit. We apply our formalism to compute the 1-loop power spectrum and the correlation function in $f(R)$ gravity by using different resummation schemes. We further discuss the IR divergences of these formalisms.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Toward unbiased estimations of the statefinder parameters

With the use of simulated supernova catalogs, we show that the statefinder parameters turn out to be poorly and biased estimated by standard cosmography. To this end, we compute their standard deviations and several bias statistics on cosmologies near the concordance model, demonstrating that these are very large, making standard cosmography unsuitable for future and wider compilations of data. To overcome this issue, we propose a new method that consists in introducing the series of the Hubble function into the luminosity distance, instead of considering the usual direct Taylor expansions of the luminosity distance. Moreover, in order to speed up the numerical computations, we estimate the coefficients of our expansions in a hierarchical manner, in which the order of the expansion depends on the redshift of every single piece of data. In addition, we propose two hybrids methods that incorporates standard cosmography at low redshifts. The methods presented here perform better than the standard approach of cosmography both in the errors and bias of the estimated statefinders. We further propose a one-parameter diagnostic to reject non-viable methods in cosmography.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

The dark matter dispersion tensor in perturbation theory

We compute the dark matter velocity dispersion tensor up to third order in perturbation theory using the Lagrangian formalism, revealing growing solutions at the third and higher orders. Our results are general and can be used for any other perturbative formalism. As an application, corrections to the matter power spectrum are calculated, and we find that some of them have the same structure as those in the effective field theory of large-scale structure, with "EFT-like" coefficients that grow quadratically with the linear growth function and are further suppressed by powers of the logarithmic linear growth factor $f$; other corrections present additional $k$ dependence. Due to the velocity dispersions, there exists a free-streaming scale that suppresses the whole 1-loop power spectrum. Furthermore, we find that as a consequence of the nonlinear evolution, the free-streaming length is shifted towards larger scales, wiping out more structure than that expected in linear theory. Therefore, we argue that the formalism developed here is better suited for a perturbation treatment of warm dark matter or neutrino clustering, where the velocity dispersion effects are well known to be important. We discuss implications related to the nature of dark matter.

astro-ph.CO↗