arXiv subjects

Christophe Pichon

Publications and source records attributed to Christophe Pichon.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2011

The angular momentum of baryons and dark matter halos revisited

Recent theoretical studies have shown that galaxies at high redshift are fed by cold, dense gas filaments, suggesting angular momentum transport by gas differs from that by dark matter. Revisiting this issue using high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamics simulations with adaptive mesh refinement, we find that at the time of accretion, gas and dark matter do carry a similar amount of specific angular momentum, but that it is systematically higher than that of the dark matter halo as a whole. At high redshift, freshly accreted gas rapidly streams into the central region of the halo, directly depositing this large amount of angular momentum within a sphere of radius r=0.1rvir. In contrast, dark matter particles pass through the central region unscathed, and a fraction of them ends up populating the outer regions of the halo (r/rvir>0.1), redistributing angular momentum in the process. As a result, large-scale motions of the cosmic web have to be considered as the origin of gas angular momentum rather than its virialised dark matter halo host. This generic result holds for halos of all masses at all redshifts, as radiative cooling ensures that a significant fraction of baryons remain trapped at the centre of the halos. Despite this injection of angular momentum enriched gas, we predict an amount for stellar discs which is in fair agreement with observations at z=0. This arises because the total specific angular momentum of the baryons remains close to that of dark matter halos. We propose a new scenario where gas efficiently carries the angular momentum generated by large-scale structure motions deep inside dark matter halos, redistributing it only in the vicinity of the disc.

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arXiv2011

Are cold flows detectable with metal absorption lines?

[Abridged] Cold gas flowing within the "cosmic web" is believed to be an important source of fuel for star formation at high redshift. However, the presence of such filamentary gas has never been observationally confirmed. In this work, we investigate in detail whether such cold gas is detectable using low-ionisation metal absorption lines, such as CII \lambda1334 as this technique has a proven observational record for detecting gaseous structures. Using a large statistical sample of galaxies from the Mare Nostrum N-body+AMR cosmological simulation, we find that the typical covering fraction of the dense, cold gas in 10^12 Msun haloes at z~2.5 is lower than expected (~5%). In addition, the absorption signal by the interstellar medium of the galaxy itself turns out to be so deep and so broad in velocity space that it completely drowns that of the filamentary gas. A detectable signal might be obtained from a cold filament exactly aligned with the line of sight, but this configuration is so unlikely that it would require surveying an overwhelmingly large number of candidate galaxies to tease it out. Finally, the predicted metallicity of the cold gas in filaments is extremely low (\leq 0.001 Zsun). Should this result persist when higher resolution runs are performed, it would significantly increase the difficulty of detecting filamentary gas inflows using metal lines. However, even if we assume that filaments are enriched to Zsun, the absorption signal that we compute is still weak. We are therefore led to conclude that it is extremely difficult to observationally prove or disprove the presence of cold filaments as the favorite accretion mode of galaxies using low-ionisation metal absorption lines. The Ly-alpha emission route looks more promising but due to the resonant nature of the line, radiative transfer simulations are required to fully characterize the observed signal.

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arXiv2011

Most massive halos with Gumbel Statistics

We present an analytical calculation of the extreme value statistics for dark matter halos - that is, the probability distribution of the most massive halo within some region of the universe of specified shape and size. Our calculation makes use of the counts-in-cells formalism for the correlation functions, and the halo bias derived from the Sheth-Tormen mass function. We demonstrate the power of the method on spherical regions, comparing the results to measurements in a large cosmological dark matter simulation and achieving good agreement. Particularly good fits are obtained for the most likely value of the maximum mass and for the high-mass tail of the distribution, relevant in constraining cosmologies by observations of most massive clusters.

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arXiv2010

The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure II: Illustrations

The recently introduced discrete persistent structure extractor (DisPerSE, Soubie 2010, paper I) is implemented on realistic 3D cosmological simulations and observed redshift catalogues (SDSS); it is found that DisPerSE traces equally well the observed filaments, walls, and voids in both cases. In either setting, filaments are shown to connect onto halos, outskirt walls, which circumvent voids. Indeed this algorithm operates directly on the particles without assuming anything about the distribution, and yields a natural (topologically motivated) self-consistent criterion for selecting the significance level of the identified structures. It is shown that this extraction is possible even for very sparsely sampled point processes, as a function of the persistence ratio. Hence astrophysicists should be in a position to trace and measure precisely the filaments, walls and voids from such samples and assess the confidence of the post-processed sets as a function of this threshold, which can be expressed relative to the expected amplitude of shot noise. In a cosmic framework, this criterion is comparable to friend of friend for the identifications of peaks, while it also identifies the connected filaments and walls, and quantitatively recovers the full set of topological invariants (Betti numbers) {\sl directly from the particles} as a function of the persistence threshold. This criterion is found to be sufficient even if one particle out of two is noise, when the persistence ratio is set to 3-sigma or more. The algorithm is also implemented on the SDSS catalogue and used to locat interesting configurations of the filamentary structure. In this context we carried the identification of an ``optically faint'' cluster at the intersection of filaments through the recent observation of its X-ray counterpart by SUZAKU. The corresponding filament catalogue will be made available online.

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arXiv2010

The invariant joint distribution of a stationary random field and its derivatives: Euler characteristic and critical point counts in 2 and 3D

The full moments expansion of the joint probability distribution of an isotropic random field, its gradient and invariants of the Hessian is presented in 2 and 3D. It allows for explicit expression for the Euler characteristic in ND and computation of extrema counts as functions of the excursion set threshold and the spectral parameter, as illustrated on model examples.

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arXiv2009

Probing magnetic fields with multi-frequency polarized synchrotron emission

We investigate the problem of probing the local spatial structure of the magnetic field of the interstellar medium using multi-frequency polarized maps of the synchrotron emission at radio wavelengths. We focus in this paper on the three-dimensional reconstruction of the largest scales of the magnetic field, relying on the internal depolarization (due to differential Faraday rotation) of the emitting medium as a function of electromagnetic frequency. We argue that multi-band spectroscopy in the radio wavelengths, developed in the context of high-redshift extragalactic HI lines, can be a very useful probe of the 3D magnetic field structure of our Galaxy when combined with a Maximum A Posteriori reconstruction technique. When starting from a fair approximation of the magnetic field, we are able to recover the true one by using a linearized version of the corresponding inverse problem. The spectral analysis of this problem allows us to specify the best sampling strategy in electromagnetic frequency and predicts a spatially anisotropic distribution of posterior errors. The reconstruction method is illustrated for reference fields extracted from realistic magneto-hydrodynamical simulations.

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arXiv2009

The Skeleton: Connecting Large Scale Structures to Galaxy Formation

We report on two quantitative, morphological estimators of the filamentary structure of the Cosmic Web, the so-called global and local skeletons. The first, based on a global study of the matter density gradient flow, allows us to study the connectivity between a density peak and its surroundings, with direct relevance to the anisotropic accretion via cold flows on galactic halos. From the second, based on a local constraint equation involving the derivatives of the field, we can derive predictions for powerful statistics, such as the differential length and the relative saddle to extrema counts of the Cosmic web as a function of density threshold (with application to percolation of structures and connectivity), as well as a theoretical framework to study their cosmic evolution through the onset of gravity-induced non-linearities.

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arXiv2009

Cosmic star-formation history from a non-parametric inversion of infrared galaxy counts

[Abridged] This paper aims at providing new conservative constraints to the cosmic star-formation history from the empirical modeling of mid- and far-infrared data. We perform a non-parametric inversion of galaxy counts at 15, 24, 70, 160, and 850 microns simultaneously. It is a "blind" search (no redshift information is required) of all possible evolutions of the infrared luminosity function of galaxies, from which the evolution of the star-formation rate density and its uncertainties are derived. The cosmic infrared background (CIRB) measurements are used a posteriori to tighten the range of solutions. The inversion relies only on two hypotheses: (1) the luminosity function remains smooth both in redshift and luminosity, (2) a set of infrared spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies must be assumed. The range of star-formation histories that we derive is well constrained and consistent with redshift-based measurements from deep surveys. The redshift decompositions of the counts are also recovered successfully. Therefore, multi-wavelength counts and CIRB (both projected observations) alone seem to contain enough information to recover the cosmic star-formation history with quantifiable errors. A peak of the SFRD at z~2 is preferred, although higher redshifts are not excluded. We also find a good consistency between the observed evolution of the stellar mass density and the prediction from our model. Finally, the inability of the inversion to model perfectly and simultaneously all the multi-wavelength infrared counts (especially at 160 microns where an excess is seen around 20 mJ) implies either (i) the existence of a sub-population of colder galaxies, (ii) a larger dispersion of dust temperatures among local galaxies than expected, (iii) or a redshift evolution of the infrared SEDs of galaxies.

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arXiv2009

Full-Sky Weak Lensing Simulation with 70 Billion Particles

We have performed a 70 billion dark-matter particles N-body simulation in a 2 $h^{-1}$ Gpc periodic box, using the concordance, cosmological model as favored by the latest WMAP3 results. We have computed a full-sky convergence map with a resolution of $Δθ\simeq 0.74$ arcmin$^{2}$, spanning 4 orders of magnitude in angular dynamical range. Using various high-order statistics on a realistic cut sky, we have characterized the transition from the linear to the nonlinear regime at $\ell \simeq 1000$ and shown that realistic galactic masking affects high-order moments only below $\ell < 200$. Each domain (Gaussian and non-Gaussian) spans 2 decades in angular scale. This map is therefore an ideal tool for testing map-making algorithms on the sphere. As a first step in addressing the full map reconstruction problem, we have benchmarked in this paper two denoising methods: 1) Wiener filtering applied to the Spherical Harmonics decomposition of the map and 2) a new method, called MRLens, based on the modification of the Maximum Entropy Method on a Wavelet decomposition. While the latter is optimal on large spatial scales, where the signal is Gaussian, MRLens outperforms the Wiener method on small spatial scales, where the signal is highly non-Gaussian. The simulated full-sky convergence map is freely available to the community to help the development of new map-making algorithms dedicated to the next generation of weak-lensing surveys.

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arXiv2008

Accurate estimators of power spectra in N-body simulations

abridged] A method to rapidly estimate the Fourier power spectrum of a point distribution is presented. This method relies on a Taylor expansion of the trigonometric functions. It yields the Fourier modes from a number of FFTs, which is controlled by the order N of the expansion and by the dimension D of the system. In three dimensions, for the practical value N=3, the number of FFTs required is 20. We apply the method to the measurement of the power spectrum of a periodic point distribution that is a local Poisson realization of an underlying stationary field. We derive explicit analytic expression for the spectrum, which allows us to quantify--and correct for--the biases induced by discreteness and by the truncation of the Taylor expansion, and to bound the unknown effects of aliasing of the power spectrum. We show that these aliasing effects decrease rapidly with the order N. The only remaining significant source of errors is reduced to the unavoidable cosmic/sample variance due to the finite size of the sample. The analytical calculations are successfully checked against a cosmological N-body experiment. We also consider the initial conditions of this simulation, which correspond to a perturbed grid. This allows us to test a case where the local Poisson assumption is incorrect. Even in that extreme situation, the third-order Fourier-Taylor estimator behaves well. We also show how to reach arbitrarily large dynamic range in Fourier space (i.e., high wavenumber), while keeping statistical errors in control, by appropriately "folding" the particle distribution.

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arXiv2008

Numerical investigation of lenses with substructures using the perturbative method

We present a statistical study of the effects induced by substructures on the deflection potential of dark matter halos in the strong lensing regime. This investigation is based on the pertubative solution around the Einstein radius (Alard 2007) in which all the information on the deflection potential is specified by only a pair of one-dimensional functions on this ring. Using direct comparison with ray-tracing solutions, we found that the iso-contours of lensed images predicted by the pertubative solution is reproduced with a mean error on their radial extension of less than 1% - in units of the Einstein radius, for reasonable substructure masses. It demonstrates the efficiency of the approximation to track possible signatures of substructures. We have evaluated these two fields and studied their properties for different lens configurations modelled either through massive dark matter halos from a cosmological N-body simulation, or via toy models of Monte Carlo distribution of substructures embedded in a triaxial Hernquist potential. As expected, the angular power spectra of these two fields tend to have larger values for larger harmonic numbers when substructures are accounted for and they can be approximated by power-laws, whose values are fitted as a function of the profile and the distribution of the substructures.

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arXiv2008

On the Onset of Stochasticity in $Λ$CDM Cosmological Simulations

The onset of stochasticity is measured in $Λ$CDM cosmological simulations using a set of classical observables. It is quantified as the local derivative of the logarithm of the dispersion of a given observable (within a set of different simulations differing weakly through their initial realization), with respect to the cosmic growth factor. In an Eulerian framework, it is shown here that chaos appears at small scales, where dynamic is non-linear, while it vanishes at larger scales, allowing the computation of a critical transition scale corresponding to ~ 3.5 Mpc/h. This picture is confirmed by Lagrangian measurements which show that the distribution of substructures within clusters is partially sensitive to initial conditions, with a critical mass upper bound scaling roughly like the perturbation's amplitude to the power 0.15. The corresponding characteristic mass, $M_{\rm crit}=2 10^{13} M_{\odot}$, is roughly of the order of the critical mass of non linearities at z=1 and accounts for the decoupling induced by the dark energy triggered acceleration. The sensitivity to detailed initial conditions spills to some of the overall physical properties of the host halo (spin and velocity dispersion tensor orientation) while other "global" properties are quite robust and show no chaos (mass, spin parameter, connexity and center of mass position). This apparent discrepancy may reflect the fact that quantities which are integrals over particles rapidly average out details of difference in orbits, while the other observables are more sensitive to the detailed environment of forming halos and reflect the non-linear scale coupling characterizing the environments of halos.

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arXiv2006

Dynamical flows through Dark Matter Haloes II: one and two points statistics at the virial radius

In a serie of three papers, the dynamical interplay between environments and dark matter haloes is investigated, while focussing on the dynamical flows through their virial sphere. Our method relies on both cosmological simulations, to constrain the environments, and an extension to the classical matrix method to derive the response of the halo (see Pichon & Aubert (2006), paper I). The current paper focuses on the statistical characterisation of the environments surrounding haloes, using a set of large scale simulations. Our description relies on a `fluid' halocentric representation where the interactions between the halo and its environment are investigated in terms of a time dependent external tidal field and a source term characterizing the infall. The method is applied to 15000 haloes, with masses between 5 x 10^12 Ms and 10^14 Ms evolving between z = 1 and z = 0. The net accretion at the virial radius is found to decrease with time, resulting from both an absolute decrease of infall and from a growing contribution of outflows. Infall is found to be mainly radial and occurring at velocities ~ 0.75 V200. Outflows are also detected through the virial sphere and occur at lower velocities ~ 0.6 V200 on more circular orbits. The external tidal field is found to be strongly quadrupolar and mostly stationnary, possibly reflecting the distribution of matter in the halo's near environment. The coherence time of the small scale fluctuations of the potential hints a possible anisotropic distribution of accreted satellites. The flux density of mass on the virial sphere appears to be more clustered than the potential while the shape of its angular power spectrum seems stationnary.

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arXiv2006

The 3D skeleton of the SDSS

The length of the three-dimensional filaments observed in the fourth public data-release of the SDSS is measured using the {\em local skeleton} method. It consists in defining the set of points where the gradient of the smoothed density field is extremal along its isocontours, with some additional constraints on local curvature to probe actual ridges in the galaxy distribution. A good fit to the mean filament length per unit volume, $\cal{L}$, in the SDSS survey is found to be ${\cal{L}}=(52500\pm6500) (L/{\rm Mpc})^{-1.75\pm0.06}\rm{Mpc}/(100 \rm{Mpc})^{3}$ for $8.2 \leq L \leq 16.4$ Mpc, where $L$ is the smoothing length in Mpc. This result, which deviates only slightly, as expected, from the trivial behavior ${\cal{L}} \propto L^{-2}$, is in excellent agreement with a $Λ$CDM cosmology, as long as the matter density parameter remains in the range $0.25 < Ω_{\rm matter} < 0.4$ at one sigma confidence level, considering the universe is flat. These measurements, which are in fact dominated by linear dynamics, are not significantly sensitive to observational biases such as redshift distortion, edge effects, incompleteness, and biasing between the galaxy distribution and the dark matter distribution. Hence it is argued that the local skeleton is a rather promising and discriminating tool for the analysis of filamentary structures in three-dimensional galaxy surveys.

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arXiv2006

Dynamical flows through Dark Matter Haloes: Inner perturbative dynamics, secular evolution, and applications

We investigate statistically the dynamical consequences of cosmological fluxes of matter and related moments on progenitors of today's dark matter haloes. Their dynamics is described via canonical perturbation theory which accounts for two types of perturbations: the tidal field corresponding to fly-bys and accretion of dark matter through the halo's outer boundary. he dynamical equations are solved linearly, order by order, projecting on a biorthogonal basis to consistently satisfy the field equation. Since our solution of the Boltzmann Poisson equations is explicit, it allows statistical predictions for the ensemble distribution of the inner dynamical features of haloes. The secular evolution of open galactic haloes is investigated: we derive the kinetic equation which governs the quasi-linear evolution of dark matter profile induced by infall and its corresponding gravitational correlations. This yields a Fokker Planck-like equation for the angle-averaged underlying distribution function. We show how these extensions to the classical theory could be used to (i) observationally constrain the statistical nature of the infall (ii) predict the observed distribution and correlations of substructures in upcoming surveys, (iii) predict the past evolution of the observed distribution of clumps, and finally (iv) weight the relative importance of the intrinsic (via the unperturbed distribution function) and external (tidal and/ or infall) influence of the environment in determining the fate of galaxies.

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arXiv2005

Modelling and interpreting optical spectra of galaxies at R=10000

One way to extract more information from the integrated light of galaxies is to improve the spectral resolution at which observations and analysis are carried out. The population synthesis code currently providing the highest spectral resolution is Pegase-HR, which was made available by D. Le Borgne et al. in 2004. Based on an empirical stellar library, it provides synthetic spectra between 4000 and 6800 A at lambda/d(lambda)=10000 for any star formation history, with or without chemical evolution. Such a resolution is particularly useful for the study of low mass galaxies, massive star clusters, or other galaxy regions with low internal velocity dispersions. After a summary of the main features of Pegase-HR and comparisons with other population synthesis codes, this paper focuses on the inversion of optical galaxy spectra. We explore the limits of what information can or can not be recovered, based on theoretical principles and extensive simulations. First applications to extragalactic objects are shown.

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arXiv2004

The origin and implications of dark matter anisotropic cosmic infall on ~L* haloes

We measure the anisotropy of dark matter flows on small scales in the near environment of haloes using a large set of simulations. We rely on two different approaches to quantify the anisotropy of the cosmic infall: we measure the flows at the haloes' virial radius while describing the infalling matter via fluxes through a spherical shell; we measure the spatial and kinematical distributions of satellites and substructures around haloes detected by the subclump finder ADAPTAHOP first described in the appendix. The two methods are found to be in agreement both qualitatively and quantitatively via one and two points statistics.The infall takes place preferentially in the plane perpendicular to the direction defined by the halo's spin. We computed the excess of equatorial accretion both through rings and via a harmonic expansion of the infall. The level of anisotropy of infalling matter is found to be ~15 %. The substructures have their spin orthogonal to their velocity vector in the halo's rest frame at a level of about 5%, suggestive of an image of a flow along filamentary structures which provides an explanation for the measured anisotropy. We conclude that a halo does not see its environment as an isotropic perturbation, investigate how the anisotropy is propagated inwards using perturbation theory, and discuss briefly implications for weak lensing, warps and the thickness of galactic disks.

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arXiv2004

Metals in the Intergalactic Medium

We use high spectral resolution (R=45000) and high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N \~ 35-70 per pixel) spectra of 19 high-redshift (2.1 1. Our observations strongly suggest that the CIV/HI ratio decreases with decreasing tau(HI) with log[tau(CIV)]=1.3xlog[tau(HI)]-3.2. We do not detect CIV absorption statistically associated with gas of tau(HI)<1. However, we observe that a small fraction of the low density gas is associated with strong metal lines as a probable consequence of the IGM enrichment being highly inhomogeneous. We detect the presence of OVI down to tau(HI)~0.2 with log[tau(OVI)/tau(HI)] -2.0. We show that OVI absorption in the lowest density gas is located within ~300 km/s from strong HI lines. This suggests that this OVI phase may be part of winds flowing away from overdense regions. This effect is more important at the largest redshifts (z>2.4). Therefore, at the limit of present surveys, the presence of metals in the underdense regions of the IGM is still to be demonstrated.

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