No Arabic abstract
Galaxy clusters are a recent cosmological probe. The precision and accuracy of the cosmological parameters inferred from these objects are affected by the knowledge of cluster physics, entering the analysis through the mass-observable scaling relations, and the theoretical description of their mass and redshift distribution, modelled by the mass function. In this work, we forecast the impact of different modelling of these ingredients for clusters detected by future optical and near-IR surveys. We consider the standard cosmological scenario and the case with a time-dependent equation of state for dark energy. We analyse the effect of increasing accuracy on the scaling relation calibration, finding improved constraints on the cosmological parameters. This higher accuracy exposes the impact of the mass function evaluation, which is a subdominant source of systematics for current data. We compare two different evaluations for the mass function. In both cosmological scenarios, the use of different mass functions leads to biases in the parameter constraints. For the $Lambda$CDM model, we find a $1.6 , sigma$ shift in the $(Omega_m,sigma_8)$ parameter plane and a discrepancy of $sim 7 , sigma$ for the redshift evolution of the scatter of the scaling relations. For the scenario with a time-evolving dark energy equation of state, the assumption of different mass functions results in a $sim 8 , sigma$ tension in the $w_0$ parameter. These results show the impact, and the necessity for a precise modelling, of the interplay between the redshift evolution of the mass function and of the scaling relations in the cosmological analysis of galaxy clusters.
We perform forecasts for how baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from future spectroscopic emission line galaxy (ELG) surveys such as Euclid are degraded in the presence of spectral line misidentification. Using analytic calculations verified with mock galaxy catalogs from log-normal simulations we find that constraints are degraded in two ways, even when the interloper power spectrum is modeled correctly in the likelihood. Firstly, there is a loss of signal-to-noise ratio for the power spectrum of the target galaxies, which propagates to all cosmological constraints and increases with contamination fraction, $f_c$. Secondly, degeneracies can open up between $f_c$ and cosmological parameters. In our calculations this typically increases BAO scale uncertainties at the 10-20% level when marginalizing over parameters determining the broadband power spectrum shape. External constraints on $f_c$, or parameters determining the shape of the power spectrum, for example from cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, can remove this effect. There is a near-perfect degeneracy between $f_c$ and the power spectrum amplitude for low $f_c$ values, where $f_c$ is not well determined from the contaminated sample alone. This has the potential to strongly degrade RSD constraints. The degeneracy can be broken with an external constraint on $f_c$, for example from cross-correlation with a separate galaxy sample containing the misidentified line, or deeper sub-surveys.
Photometric galaxy surveys probe the late-time Universe where the density field is highly non-Gaussian. A consequence is the emergence of the super-sample covariance (SSC), a non-Gaussian covariance term that is sensitive to fluctuations on scales larger than the survey window. In this work, we study the impact of the survey geometry on the SSC and, subsequently, on cosmological parameter inference. We devise a fast SSC approximation that accounts for the survey geometry and compare its performance to the common approximation of rescaling the results by the fraction of the sky covered by the survey, $f_mathrm{SKY}$, dubbed full-sky approximation. To gauge the impact of our new SSC recipe, dubbed partial-sky, we perform Fisher forecasts on the parameters of the $(w_0,w_a)$-CDM model in a 3x2 points analysis, varying the survey area, the geometry of the mask and the galaxy distribution inside our redshift bins. The differences in the marginalised forecast errors, with the full-sky approximation performing poorly for small survey areas but excellently for stage-IV-like areas, are found to be absorbed by the marginalisation on galaxy bias nuisance parameters. For large survey areas, the unmarginalised errors are underestimated by about 10% for all probes considered. This is a hint that, even for stage-IV-like surveys, the partial-sky method introduced in this work will be necessary if tight priors are applied on these nuisance parameters.
We perform a detailed forecast on how well a {sc Euclid}-like survey will be able to constrain dark energy and neutrino parameters from a combination of its cosmic shear power spectrum, galaxy power spectrum, and cluster mass function measurements. We find that the combination of these three probes vastly improves the surveys potential to measure the time evolution of dark energy. In terms of a dark energy figure-of-merit defined as $(sigma(w_{mathrm p}) sigma(w_a))^{-1}$, we find a value of 690 for {sc Euclid}-like data combined with {sc Planck}-like measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in a 10-dimensional cosmological parameter space, assuming a $Lambda$CDM fiducial cosmology. For the more commonly used 7-parameter model, we find a figure-of-merit of 1900 for the same data combination. We consider also the surveys potential to measure dark energy perturbations in models wherein the dark energy is parameterised as a fluid with a nonstandard non-adiabatic sound speed, and find that in an emph{optimistic} scenario in which $w_0$ deviates by as much as is currently observationally allowed from $-1$, models with $hat{c}_mathrm{s}^2 = 10^{-6}$ and $hat{c}_mathrm{s}^2 = 1$ can be distinguished at more than $2sigma$ significance. We emphasise that constraints on the dark energy sound speed from cluster measurements are strongly dependent on the modelling of the cluster mass function; significantly weaker sensitivities ensue if we modify our model to include fewer features of nonlinear dark energy clustering. Finally, we find that the sum of neutrino masses can be measured with a $1 sigma$ precision of 0.015~eV, (abridged)
Cosmological N-body simulations represent an excellent tool to study the formation and evolution of dark matter (DM) halos and the mechanisms that have originated the universal profile at the largest mass scales in the Universe. In particular, the combination of the velocity dispersion $sigma_mathrm{v}$ with the density $rho$ can be used to define the pseudo-entropy $S(r)=sigma_mathrm{v}^2/rho^{,2/3}$, whose profile is well-described by a simple power-law $Spropto,r^{,alpha}$. We analyze a set of cosmological hydrodynamical re-simulations of massive galaxy clusters and study the pseudo-entropy profiles as traced by different collisionless components in simulated galaxy clusters: DM, stars, and substructures. We analyze four sets of simulations, exploring different resolution and physics (N-body and full hydrodynamical simulations) to investigate convergence and the impact of baryons. We find that baryons significantly affect the inner region of pseudo-entropy profiles as traced by substructures, while DM particles profiles are characterized by an almost universal behavior, thus suggesting that the level of pseudo-entropy could represent a potential low-scatter mass-proxy. We compare observed and simulated pseudo-entropy profiles and find good agreement in both normalization and slope. We demonstrate, however, that the method used to derive observed pseudo-entropy profiles could introduce biases and underestimate the impact of mergers. Finally, we investigate the pseudo-entropy traced by the stars focusing our interest in the dynamical distinction between intracluster light (ICL) and the stars bound to the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG): the combination of these two pseudo-entropy profiles is well-described by a single power-law out to almost the entire cluster virial radius.
(abridged) We study the impact of the large-angle CMB polarization datasets publicly released by the WMAP and Planck satellites on the estimation of cosmological parameters of the $Lambda$CDM model. To complement large-angle polarization, we consider the high-resolution CMB datasets from either WMAP or Planck, as well as CMB lensing as traced by Planck. In the case of WMAP, we compute the large-angle polarization likelihood starting over from low-resolution frequency maps and their covariance matrices, and perform our own foreground mitigation technique, which includes as a possible alternative Planck 353 GHz data to trace polarized dust. We find that the latter choice induces a downward shift in the optical depth $tau$, of order ~$2sigma$, robust to the choice of the complementary high-l dataset. When the Planck 353 GHz is consistently used to minimize polarized dust emission, WMAP and Planck 70 GHz large-angle polarization data are in remarkable agreement: by combining them we find $tau = 0.066 ^{+0.012}_{-0.013}$, again very stable against the particular choice for high-$ell$ data. We find that the amplitude of primordial fluctuations $A_s$, notoriously degenerate with $tau$, is the parameter second most affected by the assumptions on polarized dust removal, but the other parameters are also affected, typically between $0.5$ and $1sigma$. In particular, cleaning dust with plancks 353 GHz data imposes a $1sigma$ downward shift in the value of the Hubble constant $H_0$, significantly contributing to the tension reported between CMB based and direct measurements of $H_0$. On the other hand, we find that the appearance of the so-called low $ell$ anomaly, a well-known tension between the high- and low-resolution CMB anisotropy amplitude, is not significantly affected by the details of large-angle polarization, or by the particular high-$ell$ dataset employed.