arXiv subjects

Chung-Pei Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Chung-Pei Ma.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2004

Evolution and Color-Dependence of the Galaxy Angular Correlation Function: 350,000 Galaxies in 5 Square Degrees

When applied to deep photometric catalogs, the two-point angular correlation function, w(theta), is a sensitive probe of the evolution of galaxy clustering properties. Here we present measurements of w(theta) as a function of I_AB magnitude and (R-I) color to a depth of I_AB=24, using a sample of ~350,000 galaxies covering 5 degrees^2 in total over 5 separate fields. Using redshifts of 3319 galaxies in early DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey data, we construct robust galaxy redshift distributions as a function of I_AB and R_AB magnitude and (R-I) color for galaxies between 0 1 to z=0. A model in which the comoving scale-length, x_0, evolves linearly with redshift, x_0(z)=x_0(0)(1-Bz), fits the data better than the 'epsilon' model proposed by Groth and Peebles (1977). The clustering properties depend strongly on observed (R-I) color, with both the reddest and bluest galaxies exhibiting large clustering amplitudes and steeper slopes. Different observed (R-I) color ranges are sensitive to very disparate redshift regimes. Red galaxies with (R-I)~1.5 lie in a narrow redshift range centered at z~0.85 and have a comoving scale length of clustering at z=0.85 of x_0=5.0 +/-0.3 Mpc/h. These galaxies have early-type spectra and are likely progenitors of massive local ellipticals. The bluest galaxies with (R-I)~0 appear to be a mix of star-forming galaxies, both relatively local (z~0.3-0.6) dwarfs and bright z>1.4 galaxies, and broad-line AGN. We find that local blue dwarfs are relatively unclustered, with x_0=1.6 +/-0.2 Mpc/h. The z>1.4 blue galaxies have a larger clustering scale-length, x_0>5 Mpc/h.

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arXiv2004

Core Formation in Galactic Nuclei Due to Recoiling Black Holes

Anisotropic gravitational radiation from a coalescing black hole binary can impart a recoil velocity of up to several hundred km/s to the remnant black hole. We examine the effects of recoiling massive black holes on their host stellar bulges, both for holes that escape their host and those that return to the galactic center via dynamical friction. We show that removal of a black hole via radiation recoil generally results in a rapidly-formed central core in the stellar system, with the effect being largest when the hole stays bound to the bulge and the recoil velocity is comparable to the bulge velocity dispersion. Black hole recoil therefore provides a mechanism for producing cores in some early type galaxies, but it is expected to be most efficient in faint ellipticals that are known to have steep density profiles. We argue that these results may hint at a significant role for gas in facilitating the coalescence of binary black holes in faint (power-law) early-type galaxies.

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arXiv2004

Are Halos of Collisionless Cold Dark Matter Collisionless?

Much recent discussion about dark matter has been centered on two seemingly independent problems: the abundance of substructure in dark matter halos, and the cuspiness of the halos' inner density profile. We explore possible connections between the two problems by studying the gravitational scattering effects due to subhalos on the phase-space distribution of dark matter particles in the main halos. Our series of controlled numerical experiments indicates that the number and mass density of subhalos can be high enough to cause the collisionless dark matter particles in the inner part of a main halo to diffuse, flattening the main halo's inner cusp within a few dynamical times. Depending on the masses and concentration of the subhalos, the inner density profile of the whole system (main plus sub halos) can either steepen or flatten. Subhalo accretion can therefore introduce significant scatter in the inner density profiles of dark matter halos, offering a possible explanation for the range of profiles seen in both observations and cosmological simulations.

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arXiv2004

A Cosmological Kinetic Theory for the Evolution of Cold Dark Matter Halos with Substructure: Quasi-Linear Theory

We present a kinetic theory for the evolution of the phase-space distribution of dark matter particles in galaxy halos in the presence of a cosmological spectrum of fluctuations. This theory introduces a new way to model the formation and evolution of halos, which traditionally have been investigated by analytic gravitational infall models or numerical N-body methods. Unlike the collisionless Boltzmann equation, our kinetic equation contains nonzero terms on the right-hand side arising from stochastic fluctuations in the gravitational potential due to substructures in the dark matter mass distribution. Using statistics for constrained Gaussian random fields in standard cosmological models, we show that our kinetic equation to second-order in perturbation theory is of the Fokker-Planck form, with one scattering term representing drift and the other representing diffusion in velocity-space. The drift is radial, and the drift and diffusion coefficients depend only on positions and not velocities; our relaxation process in the quasilinear regime is therefore different from the standard two-body relaxation. We provide explicit expressions relating these coefficients to the linear power spectrum of mass fluctuation and present results for the currently favored cold dark matter model with a nonzero cosmological constant. Solutions to this kinetic equation will provide a complete description of the cold dark matter spatial and velocity distributions for the average halo during the early phases of galaxy halo formation.

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arXiv2004

Gamma-Ray Bursts and Magnetars as Possible Sources of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: Correlation of Cosmic Ray Event Positions with IRAS Galaxies

We use the two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test to study the correlation between the 60 cosmic ray events above 4x10^19 eV from the AGASA experiment and the positions of infrared luminous galaxies from the IRAS PSCz catalog. These galaxies are expected to be hosts to gamma ray bursts (GRB) and magnetars, both of which are associated with core collapse supernovae and have been proposed as possible acceleration sites for ultra high energy cosmic rays. We find consistency between the models and the AGASA events to have been drawn from the same underlying distribution of positions on the sky with KS probabilities ~50%. Application of the same test to the 11 highest AGASA events above 10^20 eV, however, yields a KS probability of < 0.5%, rejecting the models at >99.5% significance level. Taken at face value, these highest energy results suggest that the existing cosmic ray events above 10^20 eV do not owe their origin to long burst GRBs, rapidly rotating magnetars, or any other events associated with core collapse supernovae. The larger data set expected from the AUGER experiment will test whether this conclusion is real or is a statistical fluke that we estimate to be at the 2 sigma level.

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arXiv2004

Major Mergers of Galaxy Haloes: Cuspy or Cored Inner Density Profile?

We present the results from a series of collisionless N-body simulations of major mergers of galaxy dark matter haloes with density profiles having either inner cusps or cores. Our simulations range from 2x10^5 to 10^7 particles, allowing us to probe the phase-space distribution of dark matter particles in the innermost regions (less than 0.005 virial radii) of cold dark matter haloes, a subject of much recent debate. We find that a major merger of two cored haloes yields a cored halo and does not result in a cuspy profile seen in many cosmological simulations. This result is unchanged if we consider mergers with parent mass ratios of 3:1 instead of 1:1. Mergers of a cuspy halo with either a cored halo or a second cuspy halo of equal mass, on the other hand, produce cuspy haloes with a slightly reduced inner logarithmic slope. Cuspy haloes, once formed, therefore appear resilient to major mergers. We find the velocity structure of the remnants to be mildly anisotropic, with a Maxwellian velocity distribution near the centre but not in the outer portions of the final haloes. Violent relaxation is effective only during the early phase of mergers, with phase mixing likely to be the dominant relaxation process at late times.

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arXiv2003

Constraints on the Inner Cluster Mass Profile and the Power Spectrum Normalization from Strong Lensing Statistics

Strong gravitational lensing is a useful probe of both the intrinsic properties of the lenses and the cosmological parameters of the universe. The large number of model parameters and small sample of observed lens systems, however, have made it difficult to obtain useful constraints on more than a few parameters from lensing statistics. Here we examine how the recent WMAP measurements help improve the constraining power of statistics from the radio lensing survey JVAS/CLASS. We find that the absence of theta>3'' lenses in CLASS places an upper bound of beta<1.25 (1.60) at 68% (95%) CL on the inner density profile, rho \propto r^{-beta}, of cluster-sized halos. Furthermore, the favored power spectrum normalization is sigma_8 >= 0.7 (95% CL). We discuss two possibilities for stronger future constraints: a positive detection of at least one large-separation system, and next-generation radio surveys such as LOFAR.

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arXiv2003

Schechter vs. Schechter: Sub-Arcsecond Gravitational Lensing and Inner Halo Profiles

Sub-arcsecond lensing statistics depend sensitively on the inner mass profiles of low-mass objects and the faint-end slopes of the Schechter luminosity function and the Press-Schechter mass function. By requiring the luminosity and mass functions to give consistent predictions for the distribution of image separation below 1'', we show that dark matter halos with masses below 10^12 M_sun cannot have a single type of profile, be it the singular isothermal sphere (SIS) or the shallower ``universal'' dark matter profile. Instead, consistent results are achieved if we allow a fraction of the halos at a given mass to be luminous with the SIS profile, and the rest be dark with an inner logarithmic slope shallower than -1.5 to compensate for the steeper faint-end slope of the mass function compared with the luminosity function. We quantify how rapidly the SIS fraction must decrease with decreasing halo mass, thereby providing a statistical measure for the effectiveness of feedback processes on the baryon content in low-mass halos.

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arXiv2002

Neutrino Clustering in Cold Dark Matter Halos : Implications for Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

We develop a method based on the collisionless Boltzmann equation to calculate the gravitational clustering of relic neutrinos in realistic cosmological models dominated by cold dark matter (CDM) and the cosmological constant. This method can be used to estimate the phase-space distribution of any light particles in CDM halos. We find that neutrinos with masses > 0.3 eV cluster appreciably in dark matter halos above the galactic size. The resulting neutrino overdensity above the cosmic mean neutrino density increases with both the neutrino mass and the halo mass, ranging from about 10 for 0.3 eV neutrinos in 10^13 M_sun halos, to about 1500 for 1.8 eV neutrinos in 10^15 M_sun halos. We examine the implications of neutrino clustering for the Z-burst model of ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR), which interprets the observed events at E > 4 x 10^19 eV as decay products of Z-bosons from the resonant scattering between relic and high energy neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. We estimate the UHECR energy spectrum for various neutrino masses towards five of the most massive clusters in the local universe (within 100 Mpc): Virgo, Perseus-Pisces, Hydra, Centaurus, and Coma. The UHECR flux in the Z-burst model is expected to be significantly higher towards these clusters if m_nu > 0.3 eV and nearly isotropic otherwise.

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arXiv2002

Nonlinear Kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect

We derive fully nonlinear expressions for temperature fluctuations from the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, the scattering of cosmic microwave background photons off hot electrons in bulk motion. Our result reproduces the Ostriker-Vishniac effect to second order in perturbation theory but contains nonlinear corrections to the electron velocities and densities that were neglected previously. We use the recently developed halo model for nonlinear gravitational clustering to compute the nonlinear kinetic SZ power spectrum, which dominates the primary anisotropy on small angular scales.

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arXiv2001

Linear and Second-Order Evolution of Cosmic Baryon Perturbations below 10^6 Solar Masses

Studies of the growth of cosmic perturbations are typically focused on galactic scales and above. In this paper we investigate the evolution of perturbations in baryons, photons, and dark matter for masses below 10^6 M_\odot (or wavenumbers above 100 Mpc^-1). Fluctuations on these scales are of interest and importance because they grow to become the earliest collapsed objects and provide the first light sources in the so called dark ages. We investigate both the linear evolution and the second-order nonlinear effects arising from the coupling of large-scale velocity fields to small-scale perturbations in the baryon density and the electron ionization fraction. We find that this second order nonlinear coupling dominates the growth of perturbations with masses \la 10^3 M_\odot immediately after recombination, enhancing the baryon fluctuation amplitudes by a factor of ~ 5, but the nonlinear effect does not persist at late times.

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arXiv2001

Strong Gravitational Lensing and Dark Energy

We investigate the statistics of gravitational lenses in flat, low-density cosmological models with different cosmic equations of state w. We compute the lensing probabilities as a function of image separation θusing a lens population described by the mass function of Jenkins et al. and modeled as singular isothermal spheres on galactic scales and as Navarro, Frenk & White halos on cluster scales. It is found that COBE-normalized models with w > - 0.4 produce too few arcsecond-scale lenses in comparison with the JVAS/CLASS radio survey, a result that is consistent with other observational constraints on w. The wide-separation (θ> 4'') lensing rate is a particularly sensitive probe of both w and the halo mass concentration. The absence of these systems in the current JVAS/CLASS data excludes highly concentrated halos in w < -0.7 models. The constraints can be improved by ongoing and future lensing surveys of > 10^5 sources.

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arXiv2001

Constraints on the Inner Mass Profiles of Lensing Galaxies from Missing Odd Images

Most gravitational lens systems consist of two or four observable images. The absence of detectable odd images allows us to place a lower limit on the power-law slope of the inner mass profile of lensing galaxies. Using a sample of six two-image radio-loud lens systems and assuming a singular power-law surface density (Sigma proportional to r^{-beta}) for the inner several kpc of the mass distribution, we find that there is less than a 10% probability that the data are consistent with profile slopes beta < 0.80. Furthermore, individual mass modeling yields beta > 0.85 for B0739+366 and beta > 0.91 for B1030+074. Modeling central black holes as additional point masses changes the constraints in these systems to beta > 0.84 and beta > 0.83, respectively. The inner mass profiles of lensing galaxies are therefore not much shallower than isothermal.

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arXiv2001

AMiBA: Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy

As part of a 4-year Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (CosPA) Research Excellence Initiative in Taiwan, AMiBA $-$ a 19-element dual-channel 85-105 GHz interferometer array is being specifically built to search for high redshift clusters of galaxies via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect (SZE). In addition, AMiBA will have full polarization capabilities, in order to probe the polarization properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background. AMiBA, to be sited on Mauna Kea in Hawaii or in Chile, will reach a sensitivity of $\sim 1$ mJy or 7$μ$K in 1 hour. The project involves extensive international scientific and technical collaborations. The construction of AMiBA is scheduled to starting operating in early 2004.

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arXiv2000

What Does It Take to Stabilize Gravitational Clustering?

An analytical understanding of the strongly nonlinear regime of gravitational collapse has been difficult to achieve. The only insight has been the stable clustering hypothesis, which assumes that the number of neighbors for objects averaged over small length scales is constant in time. Our recently proposed analytic halo model for N-point correlation functions now provides a tool for calculating gravitational clustering properties in the strongly nonlinear regime. This model also provides a new physical framework for an independent evaluation of the validity of the stable clustering hypothesis. We derive the asymptotic nonlinear behavior of the N-point correlation functions and pairwise peculiar velocities in terms of dark matter halo properties. We show that these statistics exhibit stable clustering only when the halo mass function and halo density profile obey specific relations. The long-cherished stable clustering hypothesis therefore is not necessarily realized in practice.

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arXiv2000

Deriving the Nonlinear Cosmological Power Spectrum and Bispectrum from Analytic Dark Matter Halo Profiles and Mass Functions

We present an analytic model for the fully nonlinear power spectrum P and bispectrum Q of the cosmological mass density field. The model is based on physical properties of dark matter halos, with the three main model inputs being analytic halo density profiles, halo mass functions, and halo-halo spatial correlations, each of which has been well studied in the literature. We demonstrate that this new model can reproduce the power spectrum and bispectrum computed from cosmological simulations of both an n=-2 scale-free model and a low-density cold dark matter model. To enhance the dynamic range of these large simulations, we use the synthetic halo replacement technique of Ma & Fry (2000a), where the original halos with numerically softened cores are replaced by synthetic halos of realistic density profiles. At high wavenumbers, our model predicts a slope for the nonlinear power spectrum different from the often-used fitting formulas in the literature based on the stable clustering assumption. Our model also predicts a three-point amplitude Q that is scale dependent, in contrast to the popular hierarchical clustering assumption. This model provides a rapid way to compute the mass power spectrum and bispectrum over all length scales where the input halo properties are valid. It also provides a physical interpretation of the clustering properties of matter in the universe.

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arXiv2000

Lyman-alpha Forest Constraints on the Mass of Warm Dark Matter and the Shape of the Linear Power Spectrum

High resolution N-body simulations of cold dark matter (CDM) models predict that galaxies and clusters have cuspy halos with excessive substructure. Observations reveal smooth halos with central density cores. One possible resolution of this conflict is that the dark matter is warm (WDM); this will suppress the power spectrum on small scales. The Lyman-alpha forest is a powerful probe of the linear power spectrum on these scales. We use collisionless N-body simulations to follow the evolution of structure in WDM models, and analyze artificial Lyman-alpha forest spectra extracted from them. By requiring that there is enough small-scale power in the linear power spectrum to reproduce the observed properties of the Lyman-alpha forest in quasar spectra, we derive a lower limit to the mass of the WDM particle of 750 eV. This limit is robust to reasonable uncertainties in our assumption about the temperature of the mean density gas (T0) at z=3. We argue that any model that suppresses the CDM linear theory power spectrum more severely than a 750 eV WDM particle cannot produce the Lyman-alpha forest.

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arXiv2000

Halo Profiles and the Nonlinear Two- and Three-Point Correlation Functions of Cosmological Mass Density

We investigate the nonlinear two- and three-point correlation functions of the cosmological density field in Fourier space and test the popular hierarchical clustering model, that the three-point amplitude Q is independent of scale. In high-resolution N-body simulations of both n=-2 scale-free and cold dark matter models, we find that Q at late times is not constant but increases with wavenumber far into the nonlinear regime. Self-similar scaling also does not hold as rigorously for the three-point function as for the two-point function in the n=-2 simulation, perhaps a manifestation of the finite simulation volume. We suggest that a better understanding of the two- and three-point correlation functions in the nonlinear regime lies in the link to the density profiles of dark matter halos. We demonstrate and quantify how the slopes of the correlation functions are affected by the slope of the halo profiles using simple halo shapes and analytic clustering models.

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