Browsing by Author "Kunz, Martin"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Cosmology on the largest scales with the SKA
    (Proceedings of Science, 2014) Camera, Stefano; Raccanelli, Alvise; Bull, Philip; Bertacca, Daniele; Chen, Xuelei; Ferreira, Pedro G.; Kunz, Martin; Maartens, Roy; Mao, Yi; Santos, Mario G.; Shapiro, Paul R.; Viel, Matteo; Xug, Yidong
    The study of the Universe on ultra-large scales is one of the major science cases for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be able to probe a vast volume of the cosmos, thus representing a unique instrument, amongst next-generation cosmological experiments, for scrutinising the Universe’s properties on the largest cosmic scales. Probing cosmic structures on extremely large scales will have many advantages. For instance, the growth of perturbations is well understood for those modes, since it falls fully within the linear régime. Also, such scales are unaffected by the poorly understood feedback of baryonic physics. On ultra-large cosmic scales, two key effects become significant: primordial non-Gaussianity and relativistic corrections to cosmological observables. Moreover, if late-time acceleration is driven not by dark energy but by modifications to general relativity, then such modifications should become apparent near and above the horizon scale. As a result, the SKA is forecast to deliver transformational constraints on non-Gaussianity and to probe gravity on super-horizon scales for the first time.
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    Extending BEAMS to incorporate correlated systematic uncertainties
    (IOP Science, 2013) Knights, Michelle; Bassett, Bruce A.; Varughese, Melvin; Hlozek, Renee; Kunz, Martin; Smith, Mat; Newling, James
    New supernova surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS and the LSST will produce an unprecedented number of photometric supernova candidates, most with no spectroscopic data. Avoiding biases in cosmological parameters due to the resulting inevitable contamination from non-Ia supernovae can be achieved with the BEAMS formalism, allowing for fully photometric supernova cosmology studies. Here we extend BEAMS to deal with the case in which the supernovae are correlated by systematic uncertainties. The analytical form of the full BEAMS posterior requires evaluating 2N terms, where N is the number of supernova candidates. This `exponential catastrophe' is computationally unfeasible even for N of order 100. We circumvent the exponential catastrophe by marginalising numerically instead of analytically over the possible supernova types: we augment the cosmological parameters with nuisance parameters describing the covariance matrix and the types of all the supernovae, i, that we include in our MCMC analysis. We show that this method deals well even with large, unknown systematic uncertainties without a major increase in computational time, whereas ignoring the correlations can lead to signi cant biases and incorrect credible contours. We then compare the numerical marginalisation technique with a perturbative expansion of the posterior based on the insight that future surveys will have exquisite light curves and hence the probability that a given candidate is a Type Ia will be close to unity or zero, for most objects. Although this perturbative approach changes computation of the posterior from a 2N problem into an N2 or N3 one, we show that it leads to biases in general through a small number of misclassiffcations, implying that numerical marginalisation is superior.
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    Null tests of the concordance model in the era of Euclid and the SKA
    (Elsevier, 2021) Bengaly, Carlos; Clarkson, Chris; Kunz, Martin; Maartens, Roy
    We perform null tests of the concordance model, using H (z) measurements that mimic next-generation surveys such as Euclid and the SKA. To this end, we deploy a non-parametric method, so that we make minimal assumptions about the fiducial cosmology as well as the statistical analysis. We produce simulations assuming different cosmological models in order to verify how well we can distinguish between their signatures. We find that SKA- and Euclid-like surveys should be able to discriminate sharply between the concordance and alternative dark energy models that are compatible with the Planck CMB data. We conclude that SKA and Euclid will be able to falsify the concordance model in a statistically significant way, if one of the benchmarks models represents the true Universe, without making assumptions about the underlying cosmology.
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    Testing foundations of modern cosmology with SKA all-sky surveys
    (Proceedings of Science, 2014) Schwarz, Dominik J.; Bacon, David; Chen, Song; Clarkson, Chris; Huterer, Dragan; Kunz, Martin; Maartens, Roy; Raccanelli, Alvise; Rubart, Matthias; Starck, Jean-Luc
    Continuum and HI surveys with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will allow us to probe some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern cosmology, including the Cosmological Principle. SKA all-sky surveys will map an enormous slice of space-time and reveal cosmology at superhorizon scales and redshifts of order unity. We illustrate the potential of these surveys and discuss the prospects to measure the cosmic radio dipole at high fidelity. We outline several potentially transformational tests of cosmology to be carried out by means of SKA all-sky surveys.]