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At least 199 records · Page 11

Cosmic shear as a probe of galaxy formation physics

Here, we evaluate the potential for current and future cosmic shear measurements from large galaxy surveys to constrain the impact of baryonic physics on the matter power spectrum. We do so using a model-independent parametrization that describes deviations of the matter power spectrum from the dark-matter-only case as a set of principal components that are localized in wavenumber and redshift. We perform forecasts for a variety of current and future data sets, and find that at least ~90 per cent of the constraining power of these data sets is contained in no more than nine principal components. The constraining power of different surveys can be quantified using a figure of merit defined relative to currently available surveys. With this metric, we find that the final Dark Energy Survey data set (DES Y5) and the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey will be roughly an order of magnitude more powerful than existing data in constraining baryonic effects. Upcoming Stage IV surveys (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Euclid , and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope ) will improve upon this by a further factor of a few. We show that this conclusion is robust to marginalization over several key systematics. The ultimate power of cosmic shear to constrain galaxy formation is dependent on understanding systematics in the shear measurements at small (sub-arcminute) scales. Lastly, if these systematics can be sufficiently controlled, cosmic shear measurements from DES Y5 and other future surveys have the potential to provide a very clean probe of galaxy formation and to strongly constrain a wide range of predictions from modern hydrodynamical simulations.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

CMU DeepLens: deep learning for automatic image-based galaxy–galaxy strong lens finding

Galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing can not only provide a valuable probe of the dark matter distribution of massive galaxies, but also provide valuable cosmological constraints, either by studying the population of strong lenses or by measuring time delays in lensed quasars. Due to the rarity of galaxy-scale strongly lensed systems, fast and reliable automated lens finding methods will be essential in the era of large surveys such as Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Euclid and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CMU DeepLens, a new fully automated galaxy-galaxy lens finding method based on deep learning. This supervised machine learning approach does not require any tuning after the training step which only requires realistic image simulations of strongly lensed systems. We train and validate our model on a set of 20 000 LSST-like mock observations including a range of lensed systems of various sizes and signal-to-noise ratios (S/N). We find on our simulated data set that for a rejection rate of non-lenses of 99 per cent, a completeness of 90 per cent can be achieved for lenses with Einstein radii larger than 1.4 arcsec and S/N larger than 20 on individual g-band LSST exposures. Finally, we emphasize the importance of realistically complex simulations for training such machine learning methods by demonstrating that the performance of models of significantly different complexities cannot be distinguished on simpler simulations. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/McWilliamsCenter/CMUDeepLens.

gravitational lensing: strong↗

The ellipticity of galaxy cluster haloes from satellite galaxies and weak lensing

Here, we study the ellipticity of galaxy cluster haloes as characterized by the distribution of cluster galaxies and as measured with weak lensing. We use Monte Carlo simulations of elliptical cluster density profiles to estimate and correct for Poisson noise bias, edge bias and projection effects. We apply our methodology to 10 428 Sloan Digital Sky Survey clusters identified by the redMaPPer algorithm with richness above 20. We find a mean ellipticity =0.271 ± 0.002 (stat) ±0.031 (sys) corresponding to an axis ratio = 0.573 ± 0.002 (stat) ±0.039 (sys). We compare this ellipticity of the satellites to the halo shape, through a stacked lensing measurement using optimal estimators of the lensing quadrupole based on Clampitt and Jain (2016). We find a best-fitting axis ratio of 0.56 ± 0.09 (stat) ±0.03 (sys), consistent with the ellipticity of the satellite distribution. Thus, cluster galaxies trace the shape of the dark matter halo to within our estimated uncertainties. Finally, we restack the satellite and lensing ellipticity measurements along the major axis of the cluster central galaxy's light distribution. From the lensing measurements, we infer a misalignment angle with an root-mean-square of 30° ± 10° when stacking on the central galaxy. We discuss applications of halo shape measurements to test the effects of the baryonic gas and active galactic nucleus feedback, as well as dark matter and gravity. The major improvements in signal-to-noise ratio expected with the ongoing Dark Energy Survey and future surveys from Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Euclid, and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope will make halo shapes a useful probe of these effects.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Eight new luminous z ≥ 6 quasars discovered via SED model fitting of VISTA, WISE and Dark Energy Survey Year 1 observations

We present the discovery and spectroscopic confirmation with the ESO NTT and Gemini South telescopes of eight new 6.0 < z < 6.5 quasars with z$_{AB}$ < 21.0. These quasars were photometrically selected without any star-galaxy morphological criteria from 1533 deg$^{2}$ using SED model fitting to photometric data from the Dark Energy Survey (g, r, i, z, Y), the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (J, H, K) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (W1, W2). The photometric data was fitted with a grid of quasar model SEDs with redshift dependent Lyman-{\alpha} forest absorption and a range of intrinsic reddening as well as a series of low mass cool star models. Candidates were ranked using on a SED-model based $\chi^{2}$-statistic, which is extendable to other future imaging surveys (e.g. LSST, Euclid). Our spectral confirmation success rate is 100% without the need for follow-up photometric observations as used in other studies of this type. Combined with automatic removal of the main types of non-astrophysical contaminants the method allows large data sets to be processed without human intervention and without being over run by spurious false candidates. We also present a robust parametric redshift estimating technique that gives comparable accuracy to MgII and CO based redshift estimators. We find two z $\sim$ 6.2 quasars with HII near zone sizes < 3 proper Mpc which could indicate that these quasars may be young with ages < 10$^6$ - 10$^7$ years or lie in over dense regions of the IGM. The z = 6.5 quasar VDESJ0224-4711 has J$_{AB}$ = 19.75 is the second most luminous quasar known with z > 6.5.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters

We constrain the mass-richness scaling relation of redMaPPer galaxy clusters identified in the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 data using weak gravitational lensing. We split clusters into 4 x 3 bins of richness lambda and redshift z for lambda >= 20 and 0.2 <= z <= 0.65 and measure the mean masses of these bins using their stacked weak lensing signal. By modelling the scaling relation as M-200m|lambda, M-0(lambda/40)(F)((1 + /1.35)(G), we constrain the normalization of the scaling relation at the 5.0 per cent level, finding M-0 = [3.081 +/- 0.075(stat) +/- 0.133(sys)] center dot 10(14) M-aS (TM) at lambda = 40 and = 0.35. The recovered richness scaling index is F = 1.356 +/- 0.051 (stat) +/- 0.008 (sys) and the redshift scaling index G = -0.30 +/- 0.30 (stat) +/- 0.06 (sys). These are the tightest measurements of the normalization and richness scaling index made to date from a weak lensing experiment. We use a semi-analytic covariance matrix to characterize the statistical errors in the recovered weak lensing profiles. Our analysis accounts for the following sources of systematic error: shear and photometric redshift errors, cluster miscentring, cluster member dilution of the source sample, systematic uncertainties in the modelling of the halo-mass correlation function, halo triaxiality, and projection effects. We discuss prospects for reducing our systematic error budget, which dominates the uncertainty on M-0. Our result is in excellent agreement with, but has significantly smaller uncertainties than, previous measurements in the literature, and augurs well for the power of the DES cluster survey as a tool for precision cosmology and upcoming galaxy surveys such as LSST, Euclid, and WFIRST

clusters↗

UNIT project: Universe N-body simulations for the Investigation of Theoretical models from galaxy surveys

Abstract We present the UNIT N-body cosmological simulations project, designed to provide precise predictions for non-linear statistics of the galaxy distribution. We focus on characterizing statistics relevant to emission line and luminous red galaxies in the current and upcoming generation of galaxy surveys. We use a suite of precise particle mesh simulations (fastpm) as well as with full N-body calculations with a mass resolution of ${\sim } 1.2\times 10^9\, h^{-1}$M⊙ to investigate the recently suggested technique of Angulo and Pontzen to suppress the variance of cosmological simulations. We study redshift-space distortions, cosmic voids, higher order statistics from z = 2 down to 0. We find that both two- and three-point statistics are unbiased. Over the scales of interest for baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions, we find that the variance is greatly reduced in the two-point statistics and in the cross-correlation between haloes and cosmic voids, but is not reduced significantly for the three-point statistics. We demonstrate that the accuracy of the two-point correlation function for a galaxy survey with effective volume of 20 (h−1Gpc)3 is improved by about a factor of 40, indicating that two pairs of simulations with a volume of 1 (h−1Gpc)3 lead to the equivalent variance of ∼150 such simulations. The N-body simulations presented here thus provide an effective survey volume of about seven times the effective survey volume of Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument or Euclid. The data from this project, including dark matter fields, halo catalogues, and their clustering statistics, are publicly available.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Sparse Bayesian mass mapping with uncertainties: local credible intervals

ABSTRACT Until recently, mass-mapping techniques for weak gravitational lensing convergence reconstruction have lacked a principled statistical framework upon which to quantify reconstruction uncertainties, without making strong assumptions of Gaussianity. In previous work, we presented a sparse hierarchical Bayesian formalism for convergence reconstruction that addresses this shortcoming. Here, we draw on the concept of local credible intervals (cf. Bayesian error bars) as an extension of the uncertainty quantification techniques previously detailed. These uncertainty quantification techniques are benchmarked against those recovered via Px-MALA – a state-of-the-art proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. We find that, typically, our recovered uncertainties are everywhere conservative (never underestimate the uncertainty, yet the approximation error is bounded above), of similar magnitude and highly correlated with those recovered via Px-MALA. Moreover, we demonstrate an increase in computational efficiency of $\mathcal {O}(10^6)$ when using our sparse Bayesian approach over MCMC techniques. This computational saving is critical for the application of Bayesian uncertainty quantification to large-scale stage IV surveys such as LSST and Euclid.

Price, M. A.↗

Deblending galaxy superpositions with branched generative adversarial networks

Abstract Near-future large galaxy surveys will encounter blended galaxy images at a fraction of up to 50 per cent in the densest regions of the Universe. Current deblending techniques may segment the foreground galaxy while leaving missing pixel intensities in the background galaxy flux. The problem is compounded by the diffuse nature of galaxies in their outer regions, making segmentation significantly more difficult than in traditional object segmentation applications. We propose a novel branched generative adversarial network to deblend overlapping galaxies, where the two branches produce images of the two deblended galaxies. We show that generative models are a powerful engine for deblending given their innate ability to infill missing pixel values occluded by the superposition. We maintain high peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity scores with respect to ground truth images upon deblending. Our model also predicts near-instantaneously, making it a natural choice for the immense quantities of data soon to be created by large surveys such as Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Euclid, and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Reiman, David M.↗

Mass functions, luminosity functions, and completeness measurements from clustering redshifts

Abstract This paper presents stellar mass functions and i-band luminosity functions for Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies with i < 21 using clustering redshifts. From these measurements, we also compute targeting completeness measurements for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Clustering redshifts is a method of obtaining the redshift distribution of a sample of galaxies with only photometric information by measuring the angular cross-correlation with a spectroscopic sample in different redshift bins. We construct a spectroscopic sample containing data from the BOSS + eBOSS surveys, allowing us to recover redshift distributions from photometric data out to z ≃ 2.5. We produce k-corrected i-band luminosity functions and stellar mass functions by applying clustering redshifts to SDSS DR8 galaxies in small bins of colour and magnitude. There is little evolution in the mass function between 0.2 < z < 0.8, implying that the most massive galaxies form most of their mass before z = 0.8. These mass functions are used to produce stellar mass completeness estimates for the BOSS, giving a stellar mass completeness of $80{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ above M⋆ > 1011.4 between 0.2 < z < 0.7, with completeness falling significantly at redshifts higher than 0.7, and at lower masses. Large photometric data sets will be available in the near future (DECaLS, DES, Euclid), so this and similar techniques will become increasingly useful in order to fully utilize these data.

Bates, Dominic J.↗

Dark energy survey year 3 results: Cosmological constraints from cluster abundances, weak lensing, and galaxy clustering

Galaxy clusters provide a unique probe of the late-time cosmic structure and serve as a powerful independent test of the Λ⁢CDM model. This work presents the first set of cosmological constraints derived with ∼16,000 optically selected redMaPPer clusters across nearly 5000 deg 2 using DES year 3 datasets. Our analysis leverages a consistent modeling framework for galaxy cluster cosmology and DES-Y3 joint analyses of galaxy clustering and weak lensing (3 × 2⁢pt), ensuring direct comparability with the DES-Y3 3 × 2⁢pt analysis. Here, we obtain constraints of 𝑆 8 = 0.864 ± 0.035 and Ω m = $0.26⁢5^{+0.019}_{−0.031}$ from the cluster-based data vector. We find that cluster constraints and 3 × 2⁢pt constraints are consistent under the Λ⁢CDM model with a posterior predictive distribution (PPD) value of 0.53. The consistency between clusters and 3 × 2⁢pt provides a stringent test of Λ⁢CDM across different mass and spatial scales. Jointly analyzing clusters with 3 × 2⁢pt further improves cosmological constraints, yielding 𝑆 8 = $0.81⁢1^{+0.022}_{−0.020}$ and Ω m = $0.29⁢4^{+0.022}_{−0.033}$, a 24% improvement in the Ω m − 𝑆 8 figure of merit over 3 × 2⁢pt alone. Moreover, we find no significant deviation from the Planck CMB constraints with a probability to exceed (PTE) value of 0.6, significantly reducing previous 𝑆 8 tension claims. Finally, combining DES 3 × 2⁢pt, DES clusters, and Planck CMB places an upper limit on the sum of neutrino masses of ∑𝑚 𝜈 < 0.26 eV at 95% confidence under the Λ⁢CDM model. These results establish optically selected clusters as a key cosmological probe and pave the way for cluster-based analyses in upcoming stage-IV surveys such as LSST, Euclid, and Roman.

Abbott, T. M. C. [NSF’s National Optical-Infrared ↗

Direct detection of dark matter substructure in strong lens images with convolutional neural networks

Strong gravitational lensing is a potential way of uncovering the nature of dark matter, by finding perturbations to images that cannot be accounted for well by modeling the lens galaxy without additional structure, be it subhalos (smaller halos within the smooth lens) or line-of-sight (LOS) halos. Here, we introduce results attempting to infer the presence of substructure from images without requiring an intermediate step in which a smooth model has to be subtracted, using a simple convolutional neural network (CNN). We find that the network is only able to infer the presence of subhalos with greater than 75% accuracy when they have masses of greater than or equal to 5 × 10 9 M ⊙ if they lie within the main lens galaxy. Since less massive foreground LOS halos can have the same effect as higher-mass subhalos, the CNN can probe lower masses in the halo mass function. The accuracy does not improve significantly if we add a population of less massive subhalos. With the expectation of experiments such as Hubble Space Telescope and Euclid yielding thousands of high-quality strong lensing images in the next years, having a way of analyzing images quickly to identify candidates that merit further analysis to determine individual subhalo properties while preventing extensive resources being used for images that would yield null detections could be very useful. By understanding the sensitivity as a function of substructure mass, nondetections could be combined with the information from images with substructure to constrain the cold dark matter scenario, in particular if the sensitivity can be pushed to lower masses.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Combined kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich measurements from BOSS CMASS and LOWZ halos

The scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off the free-electron gas in galaxies and clusters leaves detectable imprints on high resolution CMB maps: the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effects (tSZ and kSZ respectively). We use combined microwave maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope DR5 and Planck in combination with the CMASS (mean redshift $\langle z \rangle$ = 0.55 and host halo mass $\langle M_{vir} \rangle$ = 3 × 10 13 M ⊙ ) and LOWZ ( $\langle z \rangle$ = 0.31 , $\langle M_{vir} \rangle$ = 5 × 10 13 M ⊙ ) galaxy catalogs from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS DR10 and DR12), to study the gas associated with these galaxy groups. Using individual reconstructed velocities, we perform a stacking analysis and reject the no-kSZ hypothesis at 6.5σ, the highest significance to date. This directly translates into a measurement of the electron number density profile, and thus of the gas density profile. Despite the limited signal to noise, the measurement shows at high significance that the gas density profile is more extended than the dark matter density profile, for any reasonable baryon abundance (formally > 90 σ for the cosmic baryon abundance). We simultaneously measure the tSZ signal, i.e., the electron thermal pressure profile of the same CMASS objects, and reject the no-tSZ hypothesis at 10σ. We combine tSZ and kSZ measurements to estimate the electron temperature to 20% precision in several aperture bins, and find it comparable to the virial temperature. In a companion paper, we analyze these measurements to constrain the gas thermodynamics and the properties of feedback inside galaxy groups. We present the corresponding LOWZ measurements in this paper, ruling out a null kSZ (tSZ) signal at 2.9 (13.9) σ , and leave their interpretation to future work. This paper and the companion paper demonstrate that current CMB experiments can detect and resolve gas profiles in low mass halos and at high redshifts, which are the most sensitive to feedback in galaxy formation and the most difficult to measure any other way. They will be a crucial input to cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, thus improving our understanding of galaxy formation. These precise gas profiles are already sufficient to reduce the main limiting theoretical systematic in galaxy-galaxy lensing: baryonic uncertainties. Future such measurements will thus unleash the statistical power of weak lensing from the Rubin, Euclid and Roman observatories. Finally, our stacking software ThumbStackis publicly available and directly applicable to future Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 data.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Modeling iterative reconstruction and displacement field in the large scale structure

The next generation of galaxy surveys like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Euclid will provide datasets orders of magnitude larger than anything available to date. Our ability to model nonlinear effects in late time matter perturbations will be a key to unlock the full potential of these datasets, and the area of initial condition reconstruction is attracting growing attention. Iterative reconstruction developed by Marcel Schmittfull et al. is a technique designed to reconstruct the displacement field from the observed galaxy distribution. The nonlinear displacement field and initial linear density field are highly correlated. Therefore, reconstructing the nonlinear displacement field enables us to extract the primordial cosmological information better than from the late time density field at the level of the two-point statistics. This paper will test to what extent the iterative reconstruction can recover the true displacement field and construct a perturbation theory model for the postreconstructed field. We model the iterative reconstruction process with Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) up to third order for dark matter in real space and compare it with N-body simulations. Here we find that the simulated iterative reconstruction does not converge to the nonlinear displacement field, and the discrepancy mainly appears in the shift term, i.e., the term correlated directly with the linear density field. On the contrary, our 3LPT model predicts that the iterative reconstruction should converge to the nonlinear displacement field. We discuss the sources of discrepancy, including numerical noise/artifacts on small scales, and present an ad hoc phenomenological model that improves the agreement.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Probing parity violation with the four-point correlation function of BOSS galaxies

Parity-violating physics in the early universe can leave detectable traces in late-time observables. While vector- and tensor-type parity violation can be observed in the B -modes of the cosmic microwave background, scalar-type signatures are visible only in the four-point correlation function (4PCF) and beyond. This work presents a blind test for parity violation in the 4PCF of the baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey (BOSS) CMASS sample, considering galaxy separations in the range [20; 160]h -1 Mpc The parity-odd 4PCF contains no contributions from standard Λ CDM physics and can be efficiently measured using recently developed estimators. Data are analyzed using both a nonparametric rank test (comparing the BOSS 4PCFs to those of realistic simulations) and a compressed χ 2 analysis, with the former avoiding the assumption of a Gaussian likelihood. These find similar results, with the rank test giving a detection probability of 99.6% (2.9 σ). This provides significant evidence for parity violation, from either cosmological sources or systematics. We perform a number of systematic tests: although these do not reveal any observational artifacts, we cannot exclude the possibility that our detection is caused by the simulations not faithfully representing the statistical properties of the BOSS data. Our measurements can be used to constrain physical models of parity violation. As an example, we consider a coupling between the inflaton and a U (1) gauge field and place bounds on the latter’s energy density, which are several orders of magnitude stronger than those previously reported. Upcoming probes such as DESI and Euclid will reveal whether our detection of parity violation is due to new physics, and strengthen the bounds on a variety of models.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Impact of baryonic feedback on HSC-Y1 weak lensing non-Gaussian statistics

Baryonic feedback is a major systematic in weak lensing cosmology. Its most studied effect is the suppression of the lensing power spectrum, a second-order statistic, on small scales. Motivated by the growing interest in statistics beyond the second order, we investigate the effect of baryons on lensing non-Gaussian statistics and the resulting biases in the matter clustering amplitude S 8 = σ 8 Ω m / 0.3 . We focus on the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 1 (HSC-Y1) data which, with its high source number density, closely resembles those expected from the upcoming Euclid and Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time. We study four non-Gaussian statistics of convergence maps—peak counts, minimum counts, the probability distribution function, and the scattering transform coefficients—in addition to the usual power spectrum. We first estimate the biases in S 8 using mock observations built from the IllustrisTNG and BAHAMAS hydrodynamical simulations and theoretical models built from dark-matter-only simulations. We find up to 1 σ bias in S 8 when the smallest scales (2 arcmin) and the highest feedback level are considered. We then analyze the HSC-Y1 data and compare the S 8 obtained for each statistic with different smoothing scales or scale cuts. As we expect that baryons mostly affect the small scales, comparing the results obtained from including and excluding small scales can indicate the level of impact from baryons. With HSC data, we find only minor ( ≤ 0.5 σ ) differences in S 8 for all statistics, even when considering very small scales (2 arcmin). Our results suggest that the effect of baryons is insignificant at the level of HSC-Y1 down to 2 arcmin for all statistics examined here, or it is canceled by other scale-dependent systematics.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Integrated Sachs-Wolfe map reconstruction in the presence of systematic errors

The decay of gravitational potentials in the presence of dark energy leads to an additional, late-time contribution to anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at large angular scales. The imprint of this so-called integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect to the CMB angular power spectrum has been detected and studied in detail, but reconstructing its spatial contributions to the CMB map, which would offer the tantalizing possibility of separating the early- from the late-time contributions to CMB temperature fluctuations, is more challenging. Here, we study the technique for reconstructing the ISW map based on information from galaxy surveys and focus in particular on how its accuracy is impacted by the presence of photometric calibration errors in input galaxy maps, which were previously found to be a dominant contaminant for ISW signal estimation. We find that both including tomographic information from a single survey and using data from multiple, complementary galaxy surveys improve the reconstruction by mitigating the impact of spurious power contributions from calibration errors. A high-fidelity reconstruction further requires one to account for the contribution of calibration errors to the observed galaxy power spectrum in the model used to construct the ISW estimator. Here, we find that if the photometric calibration errors in galaxy surveys can be independently controlled at the level required to obtain unbiased dark energy constraints, then it is possible to reconstruct ISW maps with excellent accuracy using a combination of maps from two galaxy surveys with properties similar to Euclid and SPHEREx.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Convolution Lagrangian perturbation theory for biased tracers beyond general relativity

We compare analytic predictions for real and Fourier space two-point statistics for biased tracers from a variety of Lagrangian perturbation theory approaches against those from state of the art N-body simulations in f(R) Hu-Sawicki and the nDGP braneworld modified gravity theories. We show that the novel physics of gravitational collapse in scalar tensor theories with the chameleon or the Vainshtein screening mechanism can be effectively factored in with bias parameters analytically predicted using the peak-background split formalism when updated to include the environmental sensitivity of modified gravity theories as well as changes to the halo mass function. Here, we demonstrate that convolution Lagrangian perturbation theory (CLPT) and standard perturbation theory (SPT) approaches provide accurate analytic methods to predict the correlation function and power spectra, respectively, for biased tracers in modified gravity models and are able to characterize both the baryon acoustic oscillation, power-law, and small scale regimes needed for upcoming galaxy surveys such as DESI, Euclid, LSST and WFIRST.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Test for Cosmological Parity Violation Using the 3D Distribution of Galaxies

Here we show how the galaxy four-point correlation function can test for cosmological parity violation. The detection of cosmological parity violation would reflect previously unknown forces present at the earliest moments of the Universe. Recent developments both in rapidly evaluating galaxy N-point correlation functions and in determining the corresponding covariance matrices make the search for parity violation in the four-point correlation function possible in current and upcoming surveys such as those undertaken by Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the Euclid satellite, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We estimate the limits on cosmic parity violation that could be set with these data.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗