arXiv subjects

Hong-Ming Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Hong-Ming Zhu.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Cosmic tidal reconstruction

The gravitational coupling of a long-wavelength tidal field with small-scale density fluctuations leads to anisotropic distortions of the locally measured small-scale matter correlation function. Since the local correlation function is known to be statistically isotropic in the absence of such tidal interactions, the tidal distortions can be used to reconstruct the long-wavelength tidal field and large-scale density field in analogy with the cosmic microwave background lensing reconstruction. In this paper we present the theoretical framework of cosmic tidal reconstruction and test the reconstruction in numerical simulations. We find that the density field on large scales can be reconstructed with good accuracy and the cross-correlation coefficient between the reconstructed density field and the original density field is greater than 0.9 on large scales $(k\lesssim0.1\ h/\mathrm{Mpc})$, with the filter scale $\sim1.25\ \mathrm{Mpc}/h$. This is useful in the 21cm intensity mapping survey, where the long-wavelength radial modes are lost due to a foreground subtraction process.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Nonlinear reconstruction

We present a direct approach to nonparametrically reconstruct the linear density field from an observed nonlinear map. We solve for the unique displacement potential consistent with the nonlinear density and positive definite coordinate transformation using a multigrid algorithm. We show that we recover the linear initial conditions up to the nonlinear scale ($r_{δ_rδ_L}>0.5$ for $k\lesssim1\ h/\mathrm{Mpc}$) with minimal computational cost. This reconstruction approach generalizes the linear displacement theory to fully nonlinear fields, potentially substantially expanding the baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift space distortions information content of dense large scale structure surveys, including for example SDSS main sample and 21cm intensity mapping initiatives.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Halo nonlinear reconstruction

We apply the nonlinear reconstruction method to simulated halo fields. For halo number density $2.77\times 10^{-2}$ $(h^{-1} {\rm Mpc})^{-3}$ at $z=0$, corresponding to the SDSS main sample density, we find the scale where the noise saturates the linear signal is improved to $k\gtrsim0.36\ h {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, a factor of $2.29$ improvement in scale, or $12$ in number of linear modes. The improvement is less for higher redshift or lower halo density. We expect this to substantially improve the BAO accuracy of dense, low redshift surveys, including the SDSS main sample, 6dFGS and 21cm intensity mapping initiatives.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Cosmological neutrino simulations at extreme scale

Constraining neutrino mass remains an elusive challenge in modern physics. Precision measurements are expected from several upcoming cosmological probes of large-scale structure. Achieving this goal relies on an equal level of precision from theoretical predictions of neutrino clustering. Numerical simulations of the non-linear evolution of cold dark matter and neutrinos play a pivotal role in this process. We incorporate neutrinos into the cosmological N-body code CUBEP3M and discuss the challenges associated with pushing to the extreme scales demanded by the neutrino problem. We highlight code optimizations made to exploit modern high performance computing architectures and present a novel method of data compression that reduces the phase-space particle footprint from 24 bytes in single precision to roughly 9 bytes. We scale the neutrino problem to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer and provide details of our production run, named TianNu, which uses 86% of the machine (13,824 compute nodes). With a total of 2.97 trillion particles, TianNu is currently the world's largest cosmological N-body simulation and improves upon previous neutrino simulations by two orders of magnitude in scale. We finish with a discussion of the unanticipated computational challenges that were encountered during the TianNu runtime.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Isobaric Reconstruction of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation

In this paper, we report a significant recovery of the linear baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) signature by applying the isobaric reconstruction algorithm to the non-linear matter density field. Assuming only the longitudinal component of the displacement being cosmologically relevant, this algorithm iteratively solves the coordinate transform between the Lagrangian and Eulerian frames without requiring any specific knowledge of the dynamics. For dark matter field, it produces the non-linear displacement potential with very high fidelity. The reconstruction error at the pixel level is within a few percent, and is caused only by the emergence of the transverse component after the shell-crossing. As it circumvents the strongest non-linearity of the density evolution, the reconstructed field is well-described by linear theory and immune from the bulk-flow smearing of the BAO signature. Therefore this algorithm could significantly improve the measurement accuracy of the sound horizon scale. For a perfect large-scale structure survey at redshift zero without Poisson or instrumental noise, the fractional error is reduced by a factor of 2.7, very close to the ideal limit with linear power spectrum and Gaussian covariance matrix.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Nonlinear $E$-mode clustering in Lagrangian space

We study the nonlinear $E$-mode clustering in Lagrangian space by using large scale structure $N$-body simulations and use the displacement field information in Lagrangian space to recover the primordial linear density field. We find that, compared to Eulerian nonlinear density fields, the $E$-mode displacement fields in Lagrangian space improves the cross-correlation scale $k$ with initial density field by a factor of 6-7, containing two orders of magnitude more primordial information. This illustrates ability of potential density reconstruction algorithms, to improve the baryonic acoustic oscillation measurements from current and future large scale structure surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Measurement of the Cold Dark Matter-Neutrino Dipole in the TianNu Simulation

Measurements of neutrino mass in cosmological observations rely on two point statistics that are hindered by significant degeneracies with the optical depth and galaxy bias. The relative velocity effect between cold dark matter and neutrinos induces a large scale dipole into the matter density field and may be able to provide orthogonal constraints to standard techniques. We numerically investigate this dipole in the TianNu Simulation, which contains cold dark matter and 50 meV neutrinos. We first compute the dipole using a new linear response technique where we treat the displacement caused by the relative velocity as a phase in Fourier space and then integrate the matter power spectrum over redshift. Then, we compute the dipole numerically in real space using the simulation density and velocity fields. We find excellent agreement between the linear response and N-body methods. Utilizing the dipole as an observational tool will require two tracers of the matter distribution that are differently biased with respect to the neutrino density.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Differential Neutrino Condensation onto Cosmic Structure

Astrophysical techniques have pioneered the discovery of neutrino mass properties. Current cosmological observations give an upper bound on neutrino masses by attempting to disentangle the small neutrino contribution from the sum of all matter using precise theoretical models. We discover the differential neutrino condensation effect in our TianNu N-body simulation. Neutrino masses can be inferred using this effect by comparing galaxy properties in regions of the universe with different neutrino relative abundance (i.e. the local neutrino to cold dark matter density ratio). In "neutrino-rich"' regions, more neutrinos can be captured by massive halos compared to "neutrino-poor" regions. This effect differentially skews the halo mass function and opens up the path to independent neutrino mass measurements in current or future galaxy surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Primordial density and BAO reconstruction

We present a new method to reconstruct the primordial (linear) density field using the estimated nonlinear displacement field. The divergence of the displacement field gives the reconstructed density field. We solve the nonlinear displacement field in the 1D cosmology and show the reconstruction results. The new reconstruction algorithm recovers a lot of linear modes and reduces the nonlinear damping scale significantly. The successful 1D reconstruction results imply the new algorithm should also be a promising technique in the 3D case.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Measurement of Neutrino Masses from Relative Velocities

We present a new technique to measure neutrino masses using their flow field relative to dark matter. Present day streaming motions of neutrinos relative to dark matter and baryons are several hundred km/s, comparable with their thermal velocity dispersion. This results in a unique dipole anisotropic distortion of the matter-neutrino cross power spectrum, which is observable through the dipole distortion in the cross correlation of different galaxy populations. Such a dipole vanishes if not for this relative velocity and so it is a clean signature for neutrino mass. We estimate the size of this effect and find that current and future galaxy surveys may be sensitive to these signature distortions.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Probing Neutrino Hierarchy and Chirality via Wakes

The relic neutrinos are expected to acquire a bulk relative velocity with respect to the dark matter at low redshifts, and neutrino wakes are expected to develop downstream of the dark matter halos. We propose a method of measuring the neutrino mass based on this mechanism. This neutrino wake will cause a dipole distortion of the galaxy-galaxy lensing pattern. This effect could be detected by combining upcoming lensing surveys with a low redshift galaxy survey or a 21 cm intensity mapping survey, which can map the neutrino flow field. The data obtained with LSST and Euclid should enable us to make a positive detection if the three neutrino masses are quasidegenerate with each neutrino mass of $\sim$0.1 eV, and a future high precision 21 cm lensing survey would allow the normal hierarchy and inverted hierarchy cases to be distinguished, and even the right-handed Dirac neutrinos may be detectable.

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