16575011
Spectroscopic Needs for Imaging Dark Energy Experiments
Ongoing and near-future imaging-based dark energy experiments are critically dependent upon photometric redshifts (a.k.a. photo-z's): i.e., estimates of the redshifts of objects based only on flux information obtained through broad filters. Higher-quality, lower-scatter photo-z's will result in smaller random errors on cosmological parameters; while systematic errors in photometric redshift estimates, if not constrained, may dominate all other uncertainties from these experiments. The desired optimization and calibration is dependent upon spectroscopic measurements for secure redshift information; this is the key application of galaxy spectroscopy for imaging-based dark energy experiments. Hence, to achieve their full potential, imaging-based experiments will require large sets of objects with spectroscopically-determined redshifts, for two purposes: Training: Objects with known redshift are needed to map out the relationship between object color and z (or, equivalently, to determine empirically-calibrated templates describing the rest-frame spectra of the full range of galaxies, which may be used to predict the color-z relation). The ultimate goal of training is to minimize each moment of the distribution of differences between photometric redshift estimates and the true redshifts of objects, making the relationship between them as tight as possible. The larger and more complete our "training set" of spectroscopic redshifts is, the smaller the RMS photo-z errors should be, increasing the constraining power of imaging experiments. Requirements: Spectroscopic redshift measurements for similar to 30,000 objects over >similar to 15 widely-separated regions, each at least similar to 20 arcmin in diameter, and reaching the faintest objects used in a given experiment, will likely be necessary if photometric redshifts are to be trained and calibrated with conventional techniques. Larger, more complete samples (i.e., with longer exposure times) can improve photo-z algorithms and reduce scatter further, enhancing the science return from planned experiments greatly (increasing the Dark Energy Task Force figure of merit by up to similar to 50%). Options: This spectroscopy will most efficiently be done by covering as much of the optical and near-infrared spectrum as possible at modestly high spectral resolution (lambda/Delta lambda > similar to 3000), while maximizing the telescope collecting area, field of view on the sky, and multiplexing of simultaneous spectra. The most efficient instrument for this would likely be either the proposed GMACS/MANIFEST spectrograph for the Giant Magellan Telescope or the OPTIMOS spectrograph for the European Extremely Large Telescope, depending on actual properties when built. The PFS spectrograph at Subaru would be next best and available considerably earlier, c. 2018; the proposed ngCFHT and SSST telescopes would have similar capabilities but start later. Other key options, in order of increasing total time required, are the WFOS spectrograph at TMT, MOONS at the VLT, and DESI at the Mayall 4 m telescope (or the similar 4MOST and WEAVE projects); of these, only DESI, MOONS, and PFS are expected to be available before 2020. Table 2-3 of this white paper summarizes the observation time required at each facility for strawman training samples. To attain secure redshift measurements for a high fraction of targeted objects and cover the full redshift span of future experiments, additional near-infrared spectroscopy will also be required; this is best done from space, particularly with WFIRST-2.4 and JWST. Calibration: The first several moments of redshift distributions (the mean, RMS redshift dispersion, etc.), must be known to high accuracy for cosmological constraints not to be systematics-dominated (equivalently, the moments of the distribution of differences between photometric and true redshifts could be determined instead). The ultimate goal of calibration is to characterize these moments for every subsample used in analyses - i.e., to minimize the uncertainty in their mean redshift, RMS dispersion, etc. - rather than to make the moments themselves small. Calibration may be done with the same spectroscopic dataset used for training if that dataset is extremely high in redshift completeness (i.e., no populations of galaxies to be used in analyses are systematically missed). Accurate photo-z calibration is necessary for all imaging experiments. Requirements: If extremely low levels of systematic incompleteness (<similar to 0.1%) are attained in training samples, the same datasets described above should be sufficient for calibration. However, existing deep spectroscopic surveys have failed to yield secure redshifts for 30-60% of targets, so that would require very large improvements over past experience. This incompleteness would be a limiting factor for training, but catastrophic for calibration. If <similar to 0.1% incompleteness is not attainable, the best known option for calibration of photometric redshifts is to utilize cross-correlation statistics in some form. The most direct method for this uses cross-correlations between positions on the sky of bright objects of known spectroscopic redshift with the sample of objects that we wish to calibrate the redshift distribution for, measured as a function of spectroscopic z. For such a calibration, redshifts of similar to 100,000 objects over at least several hundred square degrees, spanning the full redshift range of the samples used for dark energy, would be necessary. Options: The proposed BAO experiment eBOSS would provide sufficient spectroscopy for basic calibrations, particularly for ongoing and near-future imaging experiments. The planned DESI experiment would provide excellent calibration with redundant cross-checks, but will start after the conclusion of some imaging projects. An extension of DESI to the Southern hemisphere would provide the best possible calibration from cross-correlation methods for DES and LSST. We thus anticipate that our two primary needs for spectroscopy - training and calibration of photometric redshifts - will require two separate solutions. For ongoing and future projects to reach their full potential, new spectroscopic samples of faint objects will be needed for training; those new samples may be suitable for calibration, but the latter possibility is uncertain. In contrast, wide-area samples of bright objects are poorly suited for training, but can provide high-precision calibrations via cross-correlation techniques. Additional training/calibration redshifts and/or host galaxy spectroscopy would enhance the use of supernovae and galaxy clusters for cosmology. We also summarize additional work on photometric redshift techniques that will be needed to prepare for data from ongoing and future dark energy experiments. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
119184968
Clustering-based redshift estimation: comparison to spectroscopic redshifts
We investigate the potential and accuracy of clustering-based redshift estimation using the method proposed by M\'enard et al. (2013). This technique enables the inference of redshift distributions from measurements of the spatial clustering of arbitrary sources, using a set of reference objects for which redshifts are known. We apply it to a sample of spectroscopic galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and show that, after carefully controlling the sampling efficiency over the sky, we can estimate redshift distributions with high accuracy. Probing the full colour space of the SDSS galaxies, we show that we can recover the corresponding mean redshifts with an accuracy ranging from $\delta$z=0.001 to 0.01. We indicate that this mapping can be used to infer the redshift probability distribution of a single galaxy. We show how the lack of information on the galaxy bias limits the accuracy of the inference and show comparisons between clustering redshifts and photometric redshifts for this dataset. This analysis demonstrates, using real data, that clustering-based redshift inference provides a powerful data-driven technique to explore the redshift distribution of arbitrary datasets, without any prior knowledge on the spectral energy distribution of the sources.
54796299
Galaxy-Mass Correlations on 10 Mpc Scales in the Deep Lens Survey
We examine the projected correlation of galaxies with mass from small scales (<few hundred kpc), where individual dark matter halos dominate, out to 15 Mpc, where correlated large-scale structure dominates. We investigate these profiles as a function of galaxy luminosity and redshift. Selecting 0.8 million galaxies in the Deep Lens Survey, we use photometric redshifts and stacked weak gravitational lensing shear tomography out to radial scales of 1° from the centers of foreground galaxies. We detect correlated mass density from multiple halos and large-scale structure at radii larger than the virial radius and find the first observational evidence for growth in the galaxy-mass correlation on 10 Mpc scales with decreasing redshift and fixed range of luminosity. For a fixed range of redshift, we find a scaling of projected halo mass with rest-frame luminosity similar to previous studies at lower redshift. We control systematic errors in shape measurement and photometric redshift, enforce volume completeness through absolute magnitude cuts, and explore residual sample selection effects via simulations.
119259169
Recovering redshift distributions with cross-correlations: pushing the boundaries
Determining accurate redshift distributions for very large samples of objects has become increasingly important in cosmology. We investigate the impact of extending cross-correlation based redshift distribution recovery methods to include small scale clustering information. The major concern in such work is the ability to disentangle the amplitude of the underlying redshift distribution from the influence of evolving galaxy bias. Using multiple simulations covering a variety of galaxy bias evolution scenarios, we demonstrate reliable redshift recoveries using linear clustering assumptions well into the non-linear regime for redshift distributions of narrow redshift width. Including information from intermediate physical scales balances the increased information available from clustering and the residual bias incurred from relaxing of linear constraints. We discuss how breaking a broad sample into tomographic bins can improve estimates of the redshift distribution, and present a simple bias removal technique using clustering information from the spectroscopic sample alone.
16712090
The DRaGONS Survey: A Search for High Redshift Radio Galaxies And Heavily Obscured AGNs
We present the first results from the Distant Radio Galaxies Optically Non-detected in the SDSS (DRaGONS) Survey. Using a novel selection technique for identifying high redshift radio galaxy (HzRG) candidates, a large sample of bright (S_{1.4GHz} > 100mJy) radio sources from the FIRST survey having no optical counterpart in the SDSS is compiled. K-band imaging with the FLAMINGOS instrument on the 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak for 96 such candidates allows preliminary identification of HzRG candidates through the well-known K-z relation. Of the initial candidates, we identify 70 with magnitudes brighter than K \approx 19.5, and compute limiting magnitudes for the remainder. Assigning redshifts based on the K-z Hubble diagram gives a mean redshift for our sample of z=2.5 and a median redshift of z=2.0. This selection is also sensitive to a previously unseen population of anomalously red radio galaxies (r-K > 6.5-7), which may indicate significant obscuration at moderate redshifts. These obscured objects can be used to test the completeness of QSO surveys to the effects of reddenning. More than ten percent of our sample falls into this category, which may represent a sizable radio loud population missing from current optically selected AGN samples. We additionally identify 479 bright Extremely Red Objects (EROs) in the fields surrounding our HzRG candidates, to a magnitude of K=17.5, within a non-contiguous area of 2.38 square degrees. This constitutes a small overdensity of EROs surrounding the radio galaxy candidates over random fields, and we see possible evidence for a physical association of the EROs with the radio galaxies. However, examining the clustering of all K < 19.0 galaxies around the radio targets reveals no evidence of a global galaxy excess.
119232505
Cosmic shear results from the deep lens survey - I: Joint constraints on omega_m and sigma_8 with a two-dimensional analysis
We present a cosmic shear study from the Deep Lens Survey (DLS), a deep BVRz multi-band imaging survey of five 4 deg2 fields with two National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) 4 m telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo. For both telescopes, the change of the point-spread-function (PSF) shape across the focal plane is complicated, and the exposure-to-exposure variation of this position-dependent PSF change is significant. We overcome this challenge by modeling the PSF separately for individual exposures and CCDs with principal component analysis (PCA). We find that stacking these PSFs reproduces the final PSF pattern on the mosaic image with high fidelity, and the method successfully separates PSF-induced systematics from gravitational lensing effects. We calibrate our shears and estimate the errors, utilizing an image simulator, which generates sheared ground-based galaxy images from deep Hubble Space Telescope archival data with a realistic atmospheric turbulence model. For cosmological parameter constraints, we marginalize over shear calibration error, photometric redshift uncertainty, and the Hubble constant. We use cosmology-dependent covariances for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis and find that the role of this varying covariance is critical in our parameter estimation. Our current non-tomographic analysis alone constrains the Ω M -σ8 likelihood contour tightly, providing a joint constraint of Ω M = 0.262 ± 0.051 and σ8 = 0.868 ± 0.071. We expect that a future DLS weak-lensing tomographic study will further tighten these constraints because explicit treatment of the redshift dependence of cosmic shear more efficiently breaks the Ω M -σ8 degeneracy. Combining the current results with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7 year (WMAP7) likelihood data, we obtain Ω M = 0.278 ± 0.018 and σ8 = 0.815 ± 0.020.
12062893
The Phoenix Deep Survey: Extremely Red Galaxies and Cluster Candidates
We present the results of a study of a sample of 375 extremely red galaxies (ERGs) in the Phoenix Deep Survey, 273 of which constitute a subsample which is 80% complete to Ks = 18.5 over an area of 1160 arcmin2. The angular correlation function for ERGs is estimated, and the association of ERGs with faint radio sources explored. We find tentative evidence that ERGs and faint radio sources are associated at z 0.5. A new overdensity-mapping algorithm has been used to characterize the ERG distribution, and identify a number of cluster candidates, including a likely cluster containing ERGs at 0.5 4 criterion is more efficient than R – Ks > 5 at selecting dusty star-forming galaxies, rather than passively evolving ERGs.
119344902
Valence quark distributions in the pion
We calculate the pion's valence-quark momentum-fraction probability distribution using a Dyson-Schwinger equation model. Valence quarks with an active mass of 0.30 GeV carry 71% of the pion's momentum at a resolving scale q{sub 0}=0.54 GeV=1/(0.37 fm). The shape of the calculated distribution is characteristic of a strongly bound system and, evolved from q{sub 0} to q=2 GeV, it yields first, second, and third moments in agreement with lattice and phenomenological estimates, and valence-quarks carrying 49% of the pion's momentum. However, pointwise there is a discrepancy between our calculated distribution and that hitherto inferred from parametrizations of extant pion-nucleon Drell-Yan data.
53540181
Existence and stability of multiple solutions to the gap equation
We argue by way of examples that, as a nonlinear integral equation, the gap equation can and does possess many physically distinct solutions for the dressed-quark propagator. The examples are drawn from a class that is successful in describing a broad range of hadron physics observables. We apply the homotopy continuation method to each of our four exemplars and thereby find all solutions that exist within the interesting domains of light current-quark masses and interaction strengths; and simultaneously provide an explanation of the nature and number of the solutions, many of which may be associated with dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Introducing a stability criterion based on the scalar and pseudoscalar susceptibilities we demonstrate, however, that for any nonzero current-quark mass only the regular Nambu solution of the gap equation is stable against perturbations. This guarantees that the existence of multiple solutions to the gap equation cannot complicate the description of phenomena in hadron physics. Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (DCSB) is a particularly striking feature of the Standard Model, playing an important role in formation of the visible matter in the Universe [1]. It is apparent in the existence of a strongly momentum-dependent chiral-limit dressedquark mass function, M(p 2 ), which is obtained in solutions of models for QCD’s gap equation that provide a realistic description of hadron properties [2–4], and in a sharp increase in M(p 2 ) at p 2 . 2GeV 2 when the current-quark mass is nonzero but light. The latter is seen in both Dyson-Schwinger equation (DSE) studies [5– 7] and numerical simulations of lattice-regularised QCD [8–10]. This behaviour of the mass function must be part of any treatment of continuum strong QCD that aims to be considered realistic. The gap equation is a nonlinear integral equation. The nonlinearity gives it the power to express nonperturbative phenomena; and also leads to the curiosity that the solution is not unique. Mathematically, this should have been anticipated. However, perhaps surprisingly, it has only been established relatively recently that on a bounded, measurable domain of non-negative currentquark mass, realistic models of the QCD’s gap equation simultaneously admit more than one nonequivalent DCSB solution and also distinct solutions that may unambiguously be connected with the realization of chiral symmetry in the Wigner mode [11–13]. This feature can potentially create problems; e.g., if the additional solu
7439495
Imaging dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking: pion wave function on the light front.
We project onto the light front the pion's Poincaré-covariant Bethe-Salpeter wave function obtained using two different approximations to the kernels of quantum chromodynamics' Dyson-Schwinger equations. At an hadronic scale, both computed results are concave and significantly broader than the asymptotic distribution amplitude, φ(π)(asy)(x)=6x(1-x); e.g., the integral of φ(π)(x)/φ(π)(asy)(x) is 1.8 using the simplest kernel and 1.5 with the more sophisticated kernel. Independent of the kernels, the emergent phenomenon of dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking is responsible for hardening the amplitude.
26413962
T dependence of pseudoscalar and scalar correlations
Inhomogeneous pseudoscalar and scalar Bethe-Salpeter equations solved using a renormalization-group-improved rainbow-ladder truncation exhibit bound state poles below and above T{sub c}, the critical temperature for chiral symmetry restoration. Above T{sub c} the bound state amplitudes are identical, as are the positions and residues of the pseudoscalar and scalar poles in the vertices. In the chiral limit the {pi}{sup 0}{yields}{gamma}{gamma} coupling vanishes at T{sub c}, as do f{sub {pi}}, m{sub {sigma}}, and g{sub {sigma}{pi}{pi}}. For light current-quark masses the 2{pi} decay channel of the isoscalar-scalar bound state remains open until very near T{sub c}, and the widths of the dominant pion decay modes remain significant in the vicinity of the crossover.