wCDM Cosmologies Research Articles

Integrated Sachs-Wolfe tomography with orthogonal polynomials

Topic of this article are tomographic measurements of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect with specifically designed, orthogonal polynomials which project out statistically independent modes of the galaxy distribution. The polynomials are contructed using the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation method. To quantify the power of the iSW-effect in contraining cosmological parameters we perfom a combined Fisher matrix analysis for the iSW-, galaxy- and cross-spectra for wCDM cosmologies using the survey characteristics of PLANCK and EUCLID. The signal to noise ratio has also been studied for other contemporary galaxy surveys, such as SDSS, NVSS and 2MASS. For the cross-spectra our tomographic method provides a 16% increase in the signal to noise ratio and an improvement of up to 30% in conditional errors on parameters. Including all spectra, the marginalised errors approach an inverse square-root dependence with increasing cumulative polynomial order which underlines the statistical independence of the weighted signal spectra.

THE COYOTE UNIVERSE. III. SIMULATION SUITE AND PRECISION EMULATOR FOR THE NONLINEAR MATTER POWER SPECTRUM

Many of the most exciting questions in astrophysics and cosmology, including the majority of observational probes of dark energy, rely on an understanding of the nonlinear regime of structure formation. In order to fully exploit the information available from this regime and to extract cosmological constraints, accurate theoretical predictions are needed. Currently such predictions can only be obtained from costly, precision numerical simulations. This paper is the third in a series aimed at constructing an accurate calibration of the nonlinear mass power spectrum on Mpc scales for a wide range of currently viable cosmological models, including dark energy. The first two papers addressed the numerical challenges, and the scheme by which an interpolator was built from a carefully chosen set of cosmological models. In this paper we introduce the "Coyote Univers"' simulation suite which comprises nearly 1,000 N-body simulations at different force and mass resolutions, spanning 38 wCDM cosmologies. This large simulation suite enables us to construct a prediction scheme, or emulator, for the nonlinear matter power spectrum accurate at the percent level out to k~1 h/Mpc. We describe the construction of the emulator, explain the tests performed to ensure its accuracy, and discuss how the central ideas may be extended to a wider range of cosmological models and applications. A power spectrum emulator code is released publicly as part of this paper.

THE COYOTE UNIVERSE. II. COSMOLOGICAL MODELS AND PRECISION EMULATION OF THE NONLINEAR MATTER POWER SPECTRUM

The power spectrum of density fluctuations is a foundational source of cosmological information. Precision cosmological probes targeted primarily at investigations of dark energy require accurate theoretical determinations of the power spectrum in the nonlinear regime. To exploit the observational power of future cosmological surveys, accuracy demands on the theory are at the one percent level or better. Numerical simulations are currently the only way to produce sufficiently error-controlled predictions for the power spectrum. The very high computational cost of (precision) N-body simulations is a major obstacle to obtaining predictions in the nonlinear regime, while scanning over cosmological parameters. Near-future observations, however, are likely to provide a meaningful constraint only on constant dark energy equation of state 'wCDM' cosmologies. In this paper we demonstrate that a limited set of only 37 cosmological models -- the "Coyote Universe" suite -- can be used to predict the nonlinear matter power spectrum at the required accuracy over a prior parameter range set by cosmic microwave background observations. This paper is the second in a series of three, with the final aim to provide a high-accuracy prediction scheme for the nonlinear matter power spectrum for wCDM cosmologies.