Search results for "COSMIC"
showing 10 items of 656 documents
Variations in fundamental constants at the cosmic dawn
2020
The observation of space-time variations in fundamental constants would provide strong evidence for the existence of new light degrees of freedom in the theory of Nature. Robustly constraining such scenarios requires exploiting observations that span different scales and probe the state of the Universe at different epochs. In the context of cosmology, both the cosmic microwave background and the Lyman-α forest have proven to be powerful tools capable of constraining variations in electromagnetism, however at the moment there do not exist cosmological probes capable of bridging the gap between recombination and reionization. In the near future, radio telescopes will attempt to measure the 21…
Euclid preparation XV. Forecasting cosmological constraints for the Euclid and CMB joint analysis
2022
The combination and cross-correlation of the upcoming $Euclid$ data with cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements is a source of great expectation since it will provide the largest lever arm of epochs, ranging from recombination to structure formation across the entire past light cone. In this work, we present forecasts for the joint analysis of $Euclid$ and CMB data on the cosmological parameters of the standard cosmological model and some of its extensions. This work expands and complements the recently published forecasts based on $Euclid$-specific probes, namely galaxy clustering, weak lensing, and their cross-correlation. With some assumptions on the specifications of current and…
The ALHAMBRA survey: Estimation of the clustering signal encoded in the cosmic variance
2015
[Aims]: The relative cosmic variance (σv) is a fundamental source of uncertainty in pencil-beam surveys and, as a particular case of count-in-cell statistics, can be used to estimate the bias between galaxies and their underlying dark-matter distribution. Our goal is to test the significance of the clustering information encoded in the σv measured in the ALHAMBRA survey. [Methods]: We measure the cosmic variance of several galaxy populations selected with B-band luminosity at 0.35 ≤ z< 1.05 as the intrinsic dispersion in the number density distribution derived from the 48 ALHAMBRA subfields. We compare the observational σv with the cosmic variance of the dark matter expected from the theory…
Euclid preparation XIX. Impact of magnification on photometric galaxy clustering
2022
Aims. We investigate the importance of lensing magnification for estimates of galaxy clustering and its cross-correlation with shear for the photometric sample of Euclid. Using updated specifications, we study the impact of lensing magnification on the constraints and the shift in the estimation of the best fitting cosmological parameters that we expect if this effect is neglected.
CMB spectral distortions in generic two-field models
2017
We investigate the CMB $\mu$ distortion in models where two uncorrelated sources contribute to primordial perturbations. We parameterise each source by an amplitude, tilt, running and running of the running. We perform a detailed analysis of the distribution signal as function of the model parameters, highlighting the differences compared to single-source models. As a specific example, we also investigate the mixed inflaton-curvaton scenario. We find that the $\mu$ distortion could efficiently break degeneracies of curvaton parameters especially when combined with future sensitivity of probing the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. For example, assuming bounds $\mu < 0.5 \times 10^{-8}$ and $r<0.0…
Cosmological forecasts on thermal axions, relic neutrinos and light elements
2022
One of the targets of future Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements is to improve the current accuracy in the neutrino sector and reach a much better sensitivity on extra dark radiation in the Early Universe. In this paper we study how these improvements can be translated into constraining power for well motivated extensions of the Standard Model of elementary particles that involve axions thermalized before the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition by scatterings with gluons. Assuming a fiducial $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model, we simulate future data for Stage-IV CMB-like and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)-like surveys and analyze a m…
A search for light dark matter in XENON10 data
2011
We report results of a search for light (3.5x10^{-42} cm^2, for a dark matter particle mass m_{\chi}=8 GeV. We find that our data strongly constrain recent elastic dark matter interpretations of excess low-energy events observed by CoGeNT and CRESST-II, as well as the DAMA annual modulation signal.
Impact of cosmic inhomogeneities on SNe observations
2009
We study the impact of cosmic inhomogeneities on the interpretation of SNe observations. We build an inhomogeneous universe model that can confront supernova data and yet is reasonably well compatible with the Copernican Principle. Our model combines a relatively small local void, that gives apparent acceleration at low redshifts, with a meatball model that gives sizeable lensing (dimming) at high redshifts. Together these two elements, which focus on different effects of voids on the data, allow the model to mimic the concordance model.
In the realm of the Hubble tension—a review of solutions
2021
The $\Lambda$CDM model provides a good fit to a large span of cosmological data but harbors areas of phenomenology. With the improvement of the number and the accuracy of observations, discrepancies among key cosmological parameters of the model have emerged. The most statistically significant tension is the $4-6\sigma$ disagreement between predictions of the Hubble constant $H_0$ by early time probes with $\Lambda$CDM model, and a number of late time, model-independent determinations of $H_0$ from local measurements of distances and redshifts. The high precision and consistency of the data at both ends present strong challenges to the possible solution space and demand a hypothesis with en…
Baseline design of the thermal blocking filters for the X-IFU detector on board ATHENA
2014
ATHENA is an advanced X-ray observatory designed by a large European consortium to address the science theme "Hot and Energetic Universe" recently selected by ESA for L2 – the second Large-class mission within the Cosmic Vision science program (launch scheduled in 2028). One of the key instruments of the mission is the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU), an array of Transition Edge Sensor (TES) micro-calorimeters with high energy resolution (2.5 eV @ 6 keV) in the energy range 0.2÷12 keV, operating at the focal plane of a large effective area high angular resolution (5" HEW) grazing incidence X-ray telescope. The X-IFU operates at temperatures below 100 mK and thus requires a sophisticated c…