arXiv subjects

Isabel Sands

Publications and source records attributed to Isabel Sands.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Observational Implications of Cosmic Ray-Inverse Compton 'Boosted' Cool Cores in Clusters

X-ray luminous cool-core (CC) galaxy clusters contain powerful cosmic ray (CR) sources. High-energy CRs powering GHz synchrotron lose energy rapidly, but long-lived (~Gyr-old) populations of 0.1-1 GeV CRs persist, propagating to ~100 kpc distances and radiating via inverse-Compton (IC) scattering of CMB photons. We explore observable consequences of such CR-IC emission. This produces remarkably thermal X-ray spectra, which could contribute significantly to emission in CC centers. These naturally connect to ultra-steep radio sources and radio mini-halos at younger ages, but become undetectable in most radio, hard-X-ray, and $\gamma$-ray searches (though future imaging may detect them), while reproducing apparent density, temperature, entropy, and mass deposition rates of CCs. This would provide an alternative resolution of the cooling flow problem: clusters may appear as strong CCs because of strong CR-IC, while not actually cooling so rapidly. This predicts many observed correlations between AGN/jet properties, radio galaxy and minihalo properties, cooling radii, cavity radii and apparent X-ray cooling luminosity $L_{\rm X,cool}$. Since $L_{\rm X,cool}$ is actually from CR-IC, the observed radio-X-ray ($L_{\rm radio}-L_{\rm X,cool}$), apparent cavity power ($P_{\rm cav}-L_{\rm X,cool}-L_{\rm radio}$), and strong CC-AGN correlations are predicted without free parameters. Since CR-IC leads to X-ray overestimates of thermal pressure, the ratio of SZ to X-ray pressures should drop in CC centers. CR-IC also suppresses abundances inferred from X-ray relative to optical/UV measurements in CC centers. Both of these appear to be seen in sufficiently-resolved CCs. Effects on cluster cosmology, hydrostatic mass estimation, and non-thermal pressure/turbulence estimators are small. Redshift evolution of CC surface brightness profiles could provide strong constraints or imply CR-IC at high-$z$.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

Wide-Angle Effects in the Power Spectrum Multipoles in Next-Generation Redshift Surveys

As galaxy redshift surveys expand to larger areas on the sky, effects coming from the curved nature of the sky become important, introducing wide-angle (WA) corrections to the power spectrum multipoles at large galaxy-pair separations. These corrections particularly impact the measurement of physical effects that are predominantly detected on large scales, such the local primordial non-Gaussianities. In this paper, we examine the validity of the perturbative approach to modeling WA effects in the power spectrum multipoles for upcoming surveys by comparing to measurements on simulated galaxy catalogs using the Yamamoto estimator. We show that on the scales $k \lesssim 2\pi/\chi$, where $\chi$ is the comoving distance to the galaxies, the estimated power spectrum monopole differs by up to $5\%$ from the second-order perturbative result, with similar absolute deviations for higher multipoles. To enable precision comparison, we pioneer an improved treatment of the $\mu$-leakage effects in the Yamamoto estimator. Additionally, we devise a solution to include $f_{\rm NL}$ in the perturbative WA calculations, avoiding divergences in the original framework through the integral constraint. This allows us to conclude that WA effects can mimic a $f_{\rm NL}\sim5$ signal in the lowest SPHEREx redshift bin. We recommend using non-perturbative methods to model large scale power spectrum multipoles for $f_{\rm NL}$ measurements. A companion paper, Wen et al. 2024, addresses this by introducing a new non-perturbative method going through the spherical Fourier-Bessel basis.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Novel Conservative Methods for Adaptive Force Softening in Collisionless and Multi-Species N-Body Simulations

Modeling self-gravity of collisionless fluids (e.g. ensembles of dark matter, stars, black holes, dust, planetary bodies) in simulations is challenging and requires some force softening. It is often desirable to allow softenings to evolve adaptively, in any high-dynamic range simulation, but this poses unique challenges of consistency, conservation, and accuracy, especially in multi-physics simulations where species with different softening laws may interact. We therefore derive a generalized form of the energy-and-momentum conserving gravitational equations of motion, applicable to arbitrary rules used to determine the force softening, together with consistent associated timestep criteria, interaction terms between species with different softening laws, and arbitrary maximum/minimum softenings. We also derive new methods to maintain better accuracy and conservation when symmetrizing forces between particles. We review and extend previously-discussed adaptive softening schemes based on the local neighbor particle density, and present several new schemes for scaling the softening with properties of the gravitational field, i.e. the potential or acceleration or tidal tensor. We show that the tidal softening scheme not only represents a physically-motivated, translation and Galilean invariant and equivalence-principle respecting (and therefore conservative) method, but imposes negligible timestep or other computational penalties, ensures that pairwise two-body scattering is small compared to smooth background forces, and can resolve outstanding challenges in properly capturing tidal disruption of substructures (minimizing artificial destruction) while also avoiding excessive N-body heating. We make all of this public in the GIZMO code.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Schr\"{o}dinger-Poisson Solitons: Perturbation Theory

Self-gravitating quantum matter may exist in a wide range of cosmological and astrophysical settings from the very early universe through to present-day boson stars. Such quantum matter arises in a number of different theories, including the Peccei-Quinn axion and UltraLight (ULDM) or Fuzzy (FDM) dark matter scenarios. We consider the dynamical evolution of perturbations to the spherically symmetric soliton, the ground state solution to the Schr\"{o}dinger-Poisson system common to all these scenarios. We construct the eigenstates of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation, holding the gravitational potential fixed to its ground state value. We see that the eigenstates qualitatively capture the properties seen in full ULDM simulations, including the soliton "breathing" mode, the random walk of the soliton center, and quadrupolar distortions of the soliton. We then show that the time-evolution of the gravitational potential and its impact on the perturbations can be well described within the framework of time-dependent perturbation theory. Applying our formalism to a synthetic ULDM halo reveals considerable mixing of eigenstates, even though the overall density profile is relatively stable. Our results provide a new analytic approach to understanding the evolution of these systems as well as possibilities for faster approximate simulations.

astro-ph.CO↗