arXiv subjects

David Alonso

Publications and source records attributed to David Alonso.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Simons Observatory: Quantifying the impact of beam chromaticity on large-scale B-mode science

The Simons Observatory (SO) Small Aperture Telescopes (SATs) will observe the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization at six frequency bands. Within these bands, the angular response of the telescope (beam) is convolved with the instrument's spectral response (commonly called bandpass) and the signal from the sky, which leads to the band-averaged telescope beam response, which is sampled and digitized. The spectral properties of the band-averaged beam depend on the natural variation of the beam within the band, referred to as beam chromaticity. In this paper, we quantify the impact of the interplay of beam chromaticity and intrinsic frequency scaling from the various components that dominate the polarized sky emission on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, and foreground parameters. We do so by employing a parametric power-spectrum-based foreground component separation algorithm, namely BBPower, to which we provide beam-convolved time domain simulations performed with the beamconv software while assuming an idealized version of the SO SAT optics. We find a small, $0.02σ$, bias on $r$, due to beam chromaticity, which seems to mostly impact the dust spatial parameters, causing a maximum $0.77 σ$ bias on the dust $B$-mode spectra amplitude, $A_{d}$, when employing Gaussian foreground simulations. However, we find all parameter biases to be smaller than $1σ$ at all times, independently of the foreground model. This includes the case where we introduce additional uncertainty on the bandpass shape, which accounts for approximately half of the total allowed gain uncertainty, as estimated in previous work for the SO SATs.

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arXiv2026

Tomographic constraints on the high-energy cosmic neutrino emission rate

Despite growing efforts to find the sources of high energy neutrinos measured by IceCube, the bulk of the neutrinos remain with unknown origins. We aim to constrain the emissivity of cosmic high-energy neutrinos from extragalactic sources through their correlation with the large-scale structure. We use cross-correlations between the IceCube 10-year dataset and tomographic maps of the galaxy overdensity to place constraints on the bias-weighted high-energy neutrino emissivity out to redshift $z\sim3$. We test two different models to describe the evolution of neutrino emissivity with redshift, a power law model $\propto (1+z)^a$, and a model tracking the star formation history, assuming a simple power law model for the energy injection spectrum. We also consider a non-parametric reconstruction of the astrophysical neutrino emissivity as a function of redshift. We do not find any significant correlation, with our strongest results corresponding to a $1.9 σ$ deviation with respect to a model with zero signal. We use our measurements to place upper bounds on the bias-weighted astrophysical high-energy neutrino emission rate as a function of redshift for different source models. This analysis provides a new probe to test extragalactic neutrino source models. With future neutrino and galaxy datasets we expect the constraining and detection power of this type of analysis analysis to increase.

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arXiv2026

Illuminating the Physics of Cosmic Origin and Evolution: A UK Space Frontiers 2035 White Paper

Understanding the Universe's origins and evolution remains one of the most fundamental challenges in modern cosmology. This white paper explores three key science priorities in this field: unravelling the physics of cosmic inflation, investigating the accelerating expansion of the Universe, and precisely measuring the sum of the neutrino masses. Achieving these goals requires a dedicated survey to map the large-scale structure at high redshift in unprecedented detail. We describe how this can be achieved through a mission concept called SIRMOS, providing a high-throughput, highly multiplexed spectroscopic capability to obtain accurate redshifts for over 100 million galaxies over a wide sky area. Such a survey would leverage the deepest existing wide-area photometric catalogues for targeting, with spectra offering continuous 1.25-2.5~$μ$m wavelength coverage at moderate resolution, allowing precise redshift measurements in the $1<z<4$ range with minimal bias. We outline the scientific opportunities this presents. Recent years have seen significant advances in instrumentation, including digital micromirror devices, complex telescope mirrors, large detector arrays, and data processing pipelines. While these technologies have been demonstrated in terrestrial applications, such a survey is a unique opportunity to apply these proven capabilities in space to address fundamental questions in cosmology. Participation in such a mission will simultaneously deliver a compelling science case, help align UK Space Agency and STFC strategies, demonstrate the UK's growing capability in end-to-end space missions, and strengthen the national space economy through high-value industrial participation.

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arXiv2026

Constraints from CMB lensing tomography with projected bispectra

We measure the angular power spectrum and bispectrum of the projected overdensity of photometric DESI luminous red galaxies, and its cross-correlation with maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background lensing convergence from \planck. This analysis is enabled by the use of the ``filtered-squared bispectrum'' approach, introduced in previous work, which we generalise here to the case of cross-correlations between multiple fields. The projected galaxy bispectrum is detected at very high significance (above $30σ$ in all redshift bins), and the galaxy-galaxy-convergence bispectrum is detected above $5σ$ in the three highest-redshift bins. We find that the bispectrum is reasonably well described over a broad range of scales by a tree-level prediction using the linear galaxy bias measured from the power spectrum. We carry out the first cosmological analysis combining projected power spectra and bispectra under a relatively simple model, and show that the galaxy bispectrum can be used in combination with the power spectrum to place a constraint on the amplitude of matter fluctuations, $σ_8$, an on the non-relativistic matter fraction $Ω_m$. We find that data combinations involving the galaxy bispectrum recover constraints on these parameters that are in good agreement with those found from the traditional ``2$\times$2-point'' combination of galaxy-galaxy and galaxy-convergence power spectra, across all redshift bins.

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arXiv2025

kSZ for everyone: the pseudo-Cl approach to stacking

We present a harmonic-space estimator for the cross-correlation between the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and the reconstructed galaxy momentum field that offers several practical advantages over the traditional stacking approach. The estimator is easy to deploy using relatively modest computational resources and recovers all information available in the galaxy-kSZ cross-correlation. In particular, by using well-understood power spectrum estimation techniques, its statistical uncertainties, including potential correlated uncertainties with other large-scale structure observables, can be easily and accurately estimated. Moreover, standard kSZ stacking measurements can be reconstructed exactly from the estimator at a lower computational cost, employing harmonic-space, catalog-level techniques to recover all small-scale information.

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arXiv2025

Reconstructing spatially-varying multiplicative bias for Stage IV weak lensing galaxy surveys with a quadratic estimator

We present a quadratic estimator that detects and reconstructs spatially-varying multiplicative ($m-$) bias in weak lensing shear measurements, by exploiting the $EB$ mode coupling that it generates. The method combines $E$ and $B$ modes with inverse-variance weights, to yield an unbiased reconstruction of $m(\boldsymbolθ)$ to first order. We study the ability of future Stage IV surveys to obtain an unbiased reconstruction of the $m$-bias in differing scenarios, considering differing bias morphologies, and characteristic scales, as well as differing metrics to quantify the signal-to-noise ratio of the reconstructed map. Considering an $m$ pattern repeating on $\sim 1^\circ\times1^\circ$ sky patches, as might be the case for an $m$ field caused by focal-plane systematics. With a Euclid-like redshift distribution, we find that $\sim5\%$ rms variations in $m$-bias may be detected at the 20$σ$ level, after stacking between $\sim400$ and $\sim1000$ patches (rising to between $\sim2800$ and $\sim7600$ for $1\%$ rms variations, data volumes that are becoming available with upcoming surveys), depending on the morphology of the $m$ pattern. We show that these results are robust against the cosmological model assumed in the reconstruction, as well as the presence of intrinsic alignments or baryonic effects, and that the method shows no spurious response to additive ($c-$) bias. These results demonstrate that percent-level, spatially-varying $m-$bias can be detected at high significance, enabling diagnosis and mitigation in the Stage IV weak lensing era.

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arXiv2025

Skew-spectra: a generalization to spin-$s$

Skew-spectra allow us to extract non-Gaussian information by taking the square of a map and finding the power spectrum of this new map with the original map. This allows us to use much of the infrastructure of power spectra and avoid the intricacies of estimating three point statistics. In this paper we present the first extension of skew-spectra to arbitrary spin-$s$ fields, as a means to extract non-Gaussian information efficiently from cosmological data sets like cosmic shear or CMB polarization. We apply the formalism to weak lensing in the context of large scale structure, and discuss different ways of combining fields to build skew-spectra, all while avoiding the problems associated with mass-mapping. We provide plots of these new statistics for $Λ$CDM and vary cosmological parameters.

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arXiv2025

Systematics mitigation for catalogue-based angular power spectra

Recent work has developed a formalism for computing angular power spectra directly from catalogues containing field values at discrete positions on the sky, thereby circumventing the need to create pixelised maps of the fields, as well as avoiding aliasing and finite-resolution effects. We adapt this formalism to incorporate template deprojection for mitigating systematic biases in the measured angular power spectra. We also introduce an alternative method of mitigating the `deprojection bias' - the loss of modes induced by deprojection - employing simple simulations to compute a transfer function. We find that this approach performs at least as well as existing methods, and is relatively insensitive to how well one can guess the true power spectrum of the observed field, except at the largest scales ($\ell \lesssim 3$). Additionally, we develop exact expressions for the bias introduced by deprojection in the shot-noise component, which further improves the accuracy of this approach. We test our formalism on simulated datasets, demonstrating its applicability both to discretely sampled fields, and to the special case of galaxy clustering, with the survey selection function defined in terms of a random catalogue or as a continuous sky map. After removing the bias in the shot noise and correcting for the remaining mode loss using a transfer function, our formalism produces unbiased measurements of the angular power spectrum in all scenarios tested here. Finally, we apply our formalism to real data and show it produces results consistent with the standard map-based pseudo-$C_\ell$ formalism. We implement our method in the public code NaMaster.

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arXiv2025

Detailed theoretical modelling of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich stacking power spectrum

We examine, from first principles, the angular power spectrum between the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (kSZ) and the reconstructed galaxy momentum - the basis of existing and future "kSZ stacking" analyses. We present a comprehensive evaluation of all terms contributing to this cross-correlation, including both the transverse and longitudinal modes of the density-weighted velocity field, as well as all irreducible correlators that contribute to the momentum power spectrum. This includes the dominant component, involving the convolution of the electron-galaxy and velocity-velocity power spectra, an additional disconnected cross-term, and a connected non-Gaussian trispectrum term. Using this framework, we examine the impact of other commonly neglected contributions, such as the two-halo component of the dominant term, and the impact of satellite galaxies. Finally, we assess the sensitivity of upcoming CMB experiments to these effects and determine that they will be sensitive to the cross-term, the connected non-Gaussian trispectrum term, the two-halo contribution and impact of satellite galaxies, at a significance level of $\sim 4-6 σ$. On the other hand, the contribution from longitudinal modes is negligible in all cases. These results identify the astrophysical observables that must be accurately modelled to obtain unbiased constraints on cosmology and astrophysics from near-future kSZ measurements.

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arXiv2025

Cosmological constraints from the angular power spectrum and bispectrum of luminous red galaxies and CMB lensing

We study the projected clustering of photometric luminous red galaxies from the DESI Legacy Survey, combining their angular power spectrum, bispectrum, and cross-correlation with maps of the CMB lensing convergence from the Planck satellite. We employ a perturbative bias expansion in Eulerian space to describe the clustering of galaxies, modelling the power spectrum and bispectrum at one-loop and tree level, respectively. This allows us to use the power spectrum to self-consistently calibrate the perturbative bias parameters. We validate this model against an $N$-body simulation, and show that it can be used up to scales of at least $k_{\rm max}^P\simeq 0.2\,h{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ and $k_{\rm max}^B\simeq 0.08\,h{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, saturating the information recovered from the data. We obtain constraints on the amplitude of matter fluctuations $σ_8=0.761\pm 0.020$ and the non-relativistic matter fraction $Ω_m=0.307\pm 0.015$, as well as the combination $S_8\equivσ_8\sqrt{Ω_m/0.3}=0.769 \pm 0.020$. Including the galaxy bispectrum leads to a $10$-$20\%$ improvement on the cosmological constraints, which are also in good agreement with previous analyses of the same data, and in mild tension with Planck at the $\sim2.5σ$ level. This tension is largely present in the standard two-point function dataset, and the addition of the bispectrum increases it slightly, marginally shifting $σ_8$ downwards and $Ω_m$ upwards. Finally, using the bispectrum allows for a substantially more precise measurement of the bias parameters of this sample, which are in reasonable agreement with existing coevolution relations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Calibrating baryonic effects in cosmic shear with external data in the LSST era

Cosmological constraints derived from weak lensing (WL) surveys are limited by baryonic effects, which suppress the non-linear matter power spectrum on small scales. By combining WL measurements with data from external tracers of the gas around massive structures, it is possible to calibrate baryonic effects and, therefore, obtain more precise cosmological constraints. In this study, we generate mock data for a Stage-IV weak lensing survey such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), X-ray gas fractions, and stacked kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) measurements, to jointly constrain cosmological and astrophysical parameters describing baryonic effects (using the Baryon Correction Model - BCM). First, using WL data alone, we quantify the level to which the BCM parameters will need to be constrained to recover the cosmological constraints obtained under the assumption of perfect knowledge of baryonic feedback. We identify the most relevant baryonic parameters and determine that they must be calibrated to a precision of $\sim 10$-$20\%$ to avoid significant degradation of the fiducial WL constraints. We forecast that long-term X-ray data from $\sim 5000$ clusters should be able to reach this threshold for the parameters that characterise the abundance of hot virialised gas. Constraining the distribution of ejected gas presents a greater challenge, however, but we forecast that long-term kSZ data from a CMB-S4-like experiment should achieve the level of precision required for full self-calibration.

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arXiv2025

The impact of galaxy bias on cross-correlation tomography

The cross-correlation of galaxies at different redshifts with other tracers of the large-scale structure can be used to reconstruct the cosmic mean of key physical quantities, and their evolution over billions of years, at high precision. However, a correct interpretation of these measurements must ensure that they are independent of the clustering properties of the galaxy sample used. In this paper we explore different prescriptions to extract tomographic reconstruction measurements and use the FLAMINGO hydrodynamic simulations to show that a robust estimator, independent of the small-scale galaxy bias, can be constructed. We focus on the tomographic reconstruction of the halo bias-weighted electron pressure $\langle bP_e\rangle$ and star-formation density $\langle bρ_{\rm SFR}\rangle$, which can be reconstructed from tomographic analysis of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich and cosmic infrared background maps, respectively. We show that these quantities can be reconstructed with an accuracy of 1-3\% over a wide range of redshifts, using different galaxy samples. We also show that these measurements can be accurately interpreted using the halo model, assuming a sufficiently reliable model can be constructed for the halo mass function, large-scale halo bias, and for the dependence of the physical quantities being reconstructed on halo mass.

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arXiv2025

The Simons Observatory: Assessing the Impact of Dust Complexity on the Recovery of Primordial $B$-modes

We investigate how dust foreground complexity can affect measurements of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, in the context of the Simons Observatory, using a cross-spectrum component separation analysis. Employing a suite of simulations with realistic Galactic dust emission, we find that spatial variation in the dust frequency spectrum, parametrized by $β_d$, can bias the estimate for $r$ when modeled using a low-order moment expansion to capture this spatial variation. While this approach performs well across a broad range of dust complexity, the bias increases with more extreme spatial variation in dust frequency spectrum, reaching as high as $r\sim0.03$ for simulations with no primordial tensors and a spatial dispersion of $σ(β_d)\simeq0.3$ -- the most extreme case considered, yet still consistent with current observational constraints. This bias is driven by changes in the $\ell$-dependence of the dust power spectrum as a function of frequency that can mimic a primordial $B$-mode tensor signal. Although low-order moment expansions fail to capture the full effect when the spatial variations of $β_d$ become large and highly non-Gaussian, our results show that extended parametric methods can still recover unbiased estimates of $r$ under a wide range of dust complexities. We further find that the bias in $r$, at the highest degrees of dust complexity, is largely insensitive to the spatial structure of the dust amplitude and is instead dominated by spatial correlations between $β_d$ and dust amplitude, particularly at higher orders. If $β_d$ does spatially vary at the highest levels investigated here, we would expect to use more flexible foreground models to achieve an unbiased constraint on $r$ for the noise levels anticipated from the Simons Observatory.

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arXiv2025

First Constraints from Marked Angular Power Spectra with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey First-Year Data

We present the first application of marked angular power spectra to weak lensing data, using maps from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Year 1 (HSC-Y1) survey. Marked convergence fields, constructed by weighting the convergence field with non-linear functions of its smoothed version, are designed to encode higher-order information while remaining computationally tractable. Using simulations tailored to the HSC-Y1 data, we test three mark functions that up- or down-weight different density environments. Our results show that combining multiple types of marked auto- and cross-spectra improves constraints on the clustering amplitude parameter $S_8\equivσ_8\sqrt{Ω_{\rm m}/0.3}$ by $\approx$43\% compared to standard two-point power spectra. When applied to the HSC-Y1 data, this translates into a constraint on $S_8 = 0.807\pm 0.024$. We assess the sensitivity of the marked power spectra to systematics, including baryonic effects, intrinsic alignment, photometric redshifts, and multiplicative shear bias. These results demonstrate the promise of marked statistics as a practical and powerful tool for extracting non-Gaussian information from weak lensing surveys.

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arXiv2025

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: High-redshift measurement of structure growth from the cross-correlation of Quaia quasars and CMB lensing from ACT DR6 and $\textit{Planck}$ PR4

We measure the amplitude of matter fluctuations over a wide range of redshifts by combining CMB lensing observations from ACT DR6 and $\textit{Planck}$ PR4 with the overdensity of quasars from Quaia, a $\textit{Gaia}$ and $\textit{unWISE}$ quasar catalog. Our analysis includes the CMB lensing power spectrum from ACT DR6, the auto-correlation of two Quaia quasar samples centered at $z \simeq 1.0$ and $z \simeq 2.1$, and their cross-correlations with CMB lensing from both ACT DR6 and $\textit{Planck}$ PR4. By performing a series of contamination and systematic null tests, we find no evidence for contamination in the lensing maps, contrary to what was suggested in previous Quaia cross-correlation analyses using $\textit{Planck}$ PR4 CMB lensing data. From the joint analysis of the quasar auto- and cross-correlations with CMB lensing, and including BOSS BAO data to break the degeneracy between $Ω_m$ and $σ_8$, we obtain $σ_8 = 0.802^{+0.045}_{-0.057}$, consistent with $Λ$CDM predictions from $\textit{Planck}$ primary CMB measurements. Combining the CMB lensing auto-spectrum with the cross-correlation measurement improves the constraint on $σ_8$ by $12\%$ relative to the lensing auto-spectrum alone, yielding $σ_8 = 0.804 \pm 0.013$. This dataset combination also enables a reconstruction of structure growth across redshifts. We infer a $12\%$ constraint on the amplitude of matter fluctuations at $z > 3$, with a measurement at the median redshift of the signal of $σ_8(\tilde{z}=5.1) = 0.146^{+0.021}_{-0.014}$, consistent with $\textit{Planck}$ at the $1.4σ$ level. These results provide one of the highest redshift constraints on the growth of structure to date.

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arXiv2025

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Power Spectra, Likelihoods and $Λ$CDM Parameters

We present power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in temperature and polarization, measured from the Data Release 6 maps made from Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) data. These cover 19,000 deg$^2$ of sky in bands centered at 98, 150 and 220 GHz, with white noise levels three times lower than Planck in polarization. We find that the ACT angular power spectra estimated over 10,000 deg$^2$, and measured to arcminute scales in TT, TE and EE, are well fit by the sum of CMB and foregrounds, where the CMB spectra are described by the $Λ$CDM model. Combining ACT with larger-scale Planck data, the joint P-ACT dataset provides tight limits on the ingredients, expansion rate, and initial conditions of the universe. We find similar constraining power, and consistent results, from either the Planck power spectra or from ACT combined with WMAP data, as well as from either temperature or polarization in the joint P-ACT dataset. When combined with CMB lensing from ACT and Planck, and baryon acoustic oscillation data from DESI DR1, we measure a baryon density of $Ω_b h^2=0.0226\pm0.0001$, a cold dark matter density of $Ω_c h^2=0.118\pm0.001$, a Hubble constant of $H_0=68.22\pm0.36$ km/s/Mpc, a spectral index of $n_s=0.974\pm0.003$, and an amplitude of density fluctuations of $σ_8=0.813\pm0.005$. Including the DESI DR2 data tightens the Hubble constant to $H_0=68.43\pm0.27$ km/s/Mpc; $Λ$CDM parameters agree between the P-ACT and DESI DR2 data at the $1.6σ$ level. We find no evidence for excess lensing in the power spectrum, and no departure from spatial flatness. The contribution from Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) anisotropy is detected at high significance; we find evidence for a tilt with suppressed small-scale power compared to our baseline SZ template spectrum, consistent with hydrodynamical simulations with feedback.

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arXiv2025

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Constraints on Extended Cosmological Models

We use new cosmic microwave background (CMB) primary temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release 6 (DR6) to test foundational assumptions of the standard cosmological model and set constraints on extensions to it. We derive constraints from the ACT DR6 power spectra alone, as well as in combination with legacy data from Planck. To break geometric degeneracies, we include ACT and Planck CMB lensing data and baryon acoustic oscillation data from DESI Year-1, and further add supernovae measurements from Pantheon+ for models that affect the late-time expansion history. We verify the near-scale-invariance (running of the spectral index $d n_s/d\ln k = 0.0062 \pm 0.0052$) and adiabaticity of the primordial perturbations. Neutrino properties are consistent with Standard Model predictions: we find no evidence for new light, relativistic species that are free-streaming ($N_{\rm eff} = 2.86 \pm 0.13$, which combined with external BBN data becomes $N_{\rm eff} = 2.89 \pm 0.11$), for non-zero neutrino masses ($\sum m_ν< 0.082$ eV at 95% CL), or for neutrino self-interactions. We also find no evidence for self-interacting dark radiation ($N_{\rm idr} < 0.134$), early-universe variation of fundamental constants, early dark energy, primordial magnetic fields, or modified recombination. Our data are consistent with standard BBN, the FIRAS-inferred CMB temperature, a dark matter component that is collisionless and with only a small fraction allowed as axion-like particles, a cosmological constant, and the late-time growth rate predicted by general relativity. We find no statistically significant preference for a departure from the baseline $Λ$CDM model. In general, models introduced to increase the Hubble constant or to decrease the amplitude of density fluctuations inferred from the primary CMB are not favored by our data.

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arXiv2025

The Simons Observatory: Validation of reconstructed power spectra from simulated filtered maps for the Small Aperture Telescope survey

We present a transfer function-based method to estimate angular power spectra from filtered maps for cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys. This is especially relevant for experiments targeting the faint primordial gravitational wave signatures in CMB polarisation at large scales, such as the Simons Observatory (SO) small aperture telescopes. While timestreams can be filtered to mitigate the contamination from low-frequency noise, usual methods that calculate the mode coupling at individual multipoles can be challenging for experiments covering large sky areas or reaching few-arcminute resolution. The method we present here, although approximate, is more practical and faster for larger data volumes. We validate it through the use of simulated observations approximating the first year of SO data, going from half-wave plate-modulated timestreams to maps, and using simulations to estimate the mixing of polarisation modes induced by an example of time-domain filtering. We show its performance through an example null test and with an end-to-end pipeline that performs inference on cosmological parameters, including the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. The performance demonstration uses simulated observations at multiple frequency bands. We find that the method can recover unbiased parameters for our simulated noise levels.

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