arXiv subjects

Markus R. Mosbech

Publications and source records attributed to Markus R. Mosbech.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

High resolution Lyman-{\alpha} forest constraints on dark matter-neutrino scattering

We present new constraints on models of dark matter interacting with neutrino, based on high-resolution Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data. We perform a suite of full hydrodynamical simulations of these models, spanning a range of interaction strengths and thermal histories. We train an emulator on the simulation results. A Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis yields an upper limit on the interaction strength of $u_{\nu\chi} \leq1.5\times10^{-8}$ (95% C.L.), which is the strongest direct bound to date on such interactions. Our results exclude previous hints of non-zero interactions presented in the literature. We furthermore compare our results to those obtained by mapping warm dark matter constraints to other models with suppressed small-scale structure, and find that these methods would overestimate the constraining power for this model.

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arXiv2026

The $H_0$ World Cup. I. Summary of the baseline group stage results

The Hubble tension has reached a nominal significance above $7\sigma$, while new high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) sharpen the test of proposed solutions. Using a common framework, we compare fourteen representative alternatives to the standard $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) model in light of up-to-date CMB, BAO and supernovae data to gauge their ability to resolve the tension. The models span late-time modifications, modified recombination, and exotic pre-recombination expansion histories driven by additional radiation or a localized dark energy injection. We evaluate each proposal with complementary frequentist and Bayesian measures of the residual calibration tension and of the improvement in the joint fit. Both approaches identify the same broad hierarchy. Early dark energy and early modified gravity models perform best, shifting the $H_0$ inference without local measurement priors toward $70\,\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}\,Mpc^{-1}}$ and reducing the residual discrepancy with SH0ES to approximately $2.5-3.6\sigma$, depending on the model and statistic, while receiving strong support over $\Lambda$CDM in the combined fit. Varying the electron mass at recombination yields an intermediate improvement, whereas the enhanced-radiation and late-time scenarios do not improve over $\Lambda$CDM. This Letter summarizes the group stage of the competition; in a companion paper (Paper II) we present the results of an exhaustive set of analyses and assess their robustness to variations in modeling assumptions and datasets.

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arXiv2026

The $H_0$ world cup. II. A comprehensive competition between proposed Hubble tension solutions

Cosmology stands at a crossroads. The Hubble tension has reached a nominal significance above $7\sigma$, while analyses combining DESI BAO and Type Ia supernova data show emerging hints of departures from $\Lambda$CDM. Meanwhile, high-precision CMB measurements from ACT and SPT enable a timely and more stringent reassessment of proposed solutions to the tension. In this paper, we revisit the $H_0$ Olympics, a systematic contest comparing proposed alternatives to $\Lambda$CDM using common datasets, likelihoods, and statistical criteria. In this updated edition, the $H_0$ World Cup, we subject fourteen representative solutions to a common analysis of current CMB, BAO, and SN data. The contenders span four broad mechanisms: late-time modifications of the expansion history, modified recombination, additional pre-recombination radiation, and early non-radiative energy injection. Relative to the original analysis, the present competition includes models and mechanisms proposed in the intervening years and evaluates all contenders using both Bayesian and Frequentist tests of tension and model performance, letting the neutrino mass sum vary. We further test if late-time extensions through curvature or the Chevallier-Polarski-Linder (CPL) dark energy parametrization can aid the success of the models. Finally, we subject the leading contenders to dedicated robustness tests involving alternative CMB likelihoods and multipole cuts, supernova samples, large-scale-structure information, and big-bang nucleosynthesis constraints. This framework assesses both the ability of each mechanism to ease the Hubble tension and the robustness of our conclusions to datasets and analysis choices.

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arXiv2026

Cosmological constraints on TeV-scale dark matter subcomponents decaying between recombination and reionisation

The Dark Ages and the Cosmic Dawn are an untapped well of information about the particle physics properties of dark matter, which may become accessible with future radio telescopes able to probe the 21-cm signal from atomic hydrogen. In this work we study the impact on cosmological observables of a dark matter subcomponent composed of TeV-scale particles that decay into electrons, photons or neutrinos with a lifetime shorter than the age of the universe. We re-evaluate constraints from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) on these scenarios using the most recent data sets and estimate the sensitivity of future detections of the global 21-cm signal. Our main result is that the latter is potentially more sensitive to the effects of decaying dark matter with a lifetime $\tau \gtrsim 10^{15} \, \mathrm{s}$. This effect is strongest for the case of decays into neutrinos due to the different spectral distribution of the injected electromagnetic energy. For DM masses well above the TeV-scale, these differences become less pronounced and the sensitivity of both the CMB and the 21-cm signal depend primarily on the total amount of injected electromagnetic energy.

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arXiv2025

OL\'E -- Online Learning Emulation in Cosmology

In this work, we present OL\'E, a new online learning emulator for use in cosmological inference. The emulator relies on Gaussian Processes and Principal Component Analysis for efficient data compression and fast evaluation. Moreover, OL\'E features an automatic error estimation for optimal active sampling and online learning. All training data is computed on-the-fly, making the emulator applicable to any cosmological model or dataset. We illustrate the emulator's performance on an array of cosmological models and data sets, showing significant improvements in efficiency over similar emulators without degrading accuracy compared to standard theory codes. We find that OL\'E is able to considerably speed up the inference process, increasing the efficiency by a factor of $30-350$, including data acquisition and training. Typically the runtime of the likelihood code becomes the computational bottleneck. Furthermore, OL\'E emulators are differentiable; we demonstrate that, together with the differentiable likelihoods available in the $\texttt{candl}$ library, we can construct a gradient-based sampling method which yields an additional improvement factor of 4. OL\'E can be easily interfaced with the popular samplers $\texttt{MontePython}$ and $\texttt{Cobaya}$, and the Einstein-Boltzmann solvers $\texttt{CLASS}$ and $\texttt{CAMB}$. OL\'E is publicly available at https://github.com/svenguenther/OLE .

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arXiv2024

Emulating the Lyman-Alpha forest 1D power spectrum from cosmological simulations: New models and constraints from the eBOSS measurement

We present the Lyssa suite of high-resolution cosmological simulations of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest designed for cosmological analyses. These 18 simulations have been run using the Nyx code with $4096^3$ hydrodynamical cells in a 120 Mpc ($\sim$ 81Mpc/h) comoving box and individually provide sub-percent level convergence of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest 1d flux power spectrum. We build a Gaussian process emulator for the Lyssa simulations in the lym1d likelihood framework to interpolate the power spectrum at arbitrary parameter values. We validate this emulator based on leave-one-out tests and based on the parameter constraints for simulations outside of the training set. We also perform comparisons with a previous emulator, showing a percent level accuracy and a good recovery of the expected cosmological parameters. Using this emulator we derive constraints on the linear matter power spectrum amplitude and slope parameters $A_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}$ and $n_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}$. While the best-fit Planck $\Lambda$CDM model has $A_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}=8.79$ and $n_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}=-2.363$, from DR14 eBOSS data we find that $A_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}<7.6$ (95\% CI) and $n_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}=-2.369 \pm 0.008$. The low value of $A_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}$, in tension with Planck, is driven by the correlation of this parameter with the mean transmission of the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest. This tension disappears when imposing a well-motivated external prior on this mean transmission, in which case we find $A_{\mathrm{Ly}\alpha}=9.8\pm1.1$ in accordance with Planck.

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arXiv2024

DESI forecast for Dark Matter-Neutrino interactions using EFTofLSS

We apply the Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structure (EFTofLSS) to non-standard models of dark matter with suppressed small-scale structure imprinted by early-time physics, here exemplified by interacting dark matter (IDM) coupled to standard model neutrinos, and cross-check that the EFTofLSS has no trouble replicating the real-space halo-halo power spectrum from N-body simulations. We perform forecasts for a DESI ELG-like experiment using the redshift-space power spectrum and find that, under very conservative priors on these parameters, the EFTofLSS is not expected to yield strong constraints on dark matter interactions. However, with a better understanding of the evolution of counterterms and stochastic terms with redshift, realistic IDM models could in principle be detected using the full-shape power spectrum analysis of such a spectroscopic galaxy survey.

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arXiv2024

Everything hot everywhere all at once: Neutrinos and hot dark matter as a single effective species

Observational cosmology is rapidly closing in on a measurement of the sum M_nu of neutrino masses, at least in the simplest cosmologies, while opening the door to probes of non-standard hot dark matter (HDM) models. By extending the method of effective distributions, we show that any collection of HDM species, with arbitrary masses, temperatures, and distribution functions, including massive neutrinos, may be represented as a single effective HDM species. Implementing this method in the FlowsForTheMasses non-linear perturbation theory for free-streaming particles, we study non-standard HDM models that contain thermal QCD axions or generic bosons in addition to standard neutrinos, as well as non-standard neutrino models wherein either the distribution function of the neutrinos or their temperature is changed. Along the way, we substantially improve the accuracy of this perturbation theory at low masses, bringing it into agreement with the high-resolution TianNu neutrino N-body simulation to about 2% at k = 0.1 h/Mpc and to within 21% up to k = 1 h/Mpc. We accurately reproduce the results of simulations including axions and neutrinos of multiple masses. Studying the differences between the normal, inverted, and degenerate neutrino mass orderings on their non-linear power, we quantify the error in the common approximation of degenerate masses. We release our code publicly at http://github.com/upadhye/FlowsForTheMassesII .

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arXiv2024

One trick to treat them all: SuperEasy linear response for any hot dark matter in $N$-body simulations

We generalise the SuperEasy linear response method, originally developed to describe massive neutrinos in cosmological $N$-body simulations, to any hot dark matter (HDM) species with arbitrary momentum distributions. The method uses analytical solutions of the HDM phase space perturbations in various limits and constructs from them a modification factor to the gravitational potential that tricks the cold particles into trajectories as if HDM particles were present in the simulation box. The modification factor is algebraic in the cosmological parameters and requires no fitting. Implementing the method in a Particle-Mesh simulation code and testing it on HDM cosmologies up to the equivalent effect of $\sum m_\nu = 0.315$ eV-mass neutrinos, we find that the generalised SuperEasy approach is able to predict the total matter and cold matter power spectra to $\lesssim 0.1\%$ relative to other linear response methods and to $\lesssim 0.25\%$ relative to particle HDM simulations. Applying the method to cosmologies with mixed neutrinos\Plus{}thermal QCD axions and neutrinos\Plus{}generic thermal bosons, we find that non-standard HDM cosmologies have no intrinsically different non-linear signature in the total matter power spectrum from standard neutrino cosmologies. However, because they predict different time dependencies even at the linear level and the differences are augmented by non-linear evolution, it remains a possibility that observations at multiple redshifts may help distinguish between them.

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arXiv2023

Gravitational-wave event rates as a new probe for dark matter microphysics

We show that gravitational waves have the potential to unravel the microphysical properties of dark matter due to the dependence of the binary black hole merger rate on cosmic structure formation, which is itself highly dependent on the dark matter scenario. In particular, we demonstrate that suppression of small-scale structure -- such as that caused by interacting, warm, or fuzzy dark matter -- leads to a significant reduction in the rate of binary black hole mergers at redshifts $z\gtrsim5$. This shows that future gravitational-wave observations will provide a new probe of physics beyond the $Λ$CDM model.

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arXiv2023

Probing dark matter interactions with 21cm observations

Similarly to warm dark matter which features a cut-off in the matter power spectrum due to free-streaming, many interacting dark matter models predict a suppression of the matter power spectrum on small length scales through collisional damping. Forecasts for 21cm line intensity mapping have shown that an instrument like the SKA will be able to probe a suppression of power in warm dark matter scenarios in a statistically significant way. Here we investigate the implications of these findings on interacting dark matter scenarios, particularly dark matter-neutrino interactions, which we use as an example. Using a suite of cosmological $N$-body simulations, we demonstrate that interacting scenarios show a suppression of the non-linear power spectrum similar to warm dark matter models. This implies that 21cm line intensity mapping will be able to set the strongest limits yet on dark matter-neutrino scattering, improving the constraints by two orders of magnitude over current Lyman-$α$ bounds, and by four orders of magnitude over cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations limits. However, to distinguish between warm dark matter and interacting scenarios, our simulations show that percent-level precision measurements of the matter power spectrum at redshifts $z\gtrsim15$ are necessary, as the key features of interacting scenarios are washed out by non-linear evolution at later times.

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arXiv2023

Hybrid multi-fluid-particle simulations of the cosmic neutrino background

Simulation of the cosmic clustering of massive neutrinos is a daunting task, due both to their large velocity dispersion and to their weak clustering power becoming swamped by Poisson shot noise. We present a new approach, the multi-fluid hybrid-neutrino simulation, which partitions the neutrino population into multiple flows, each of which is characterised by its initial momentum and treated as a separate fluid. These fluid flows respond initially linearly to nonlinear perturbations in the cold matter, but slowest flows are later converted to a particle realisation should their clustering power exceed some threshold. After outlining the multi-fluid description of neutrinos, we study the conversion of the individual flows into particles, in order to quantify transient errors, as well as to determine a set of criteria for particle conversion. Assembling our results into a total neutrino power spectrum, we demonstrate that our multi-fluid hybrid-neutrino simulation is convergent to $<3\%$ if conversion happens at $z=19$ and agrees with more expensive simulations in the literature for neutrino fractions as high as $Ω_νh^2 = 0.005$. Moreover, our hybrid-neutrino approach retains fine-grained information about the neutrinos' momentum distribution. However, the momentum resolution is currently limited by free-streaming transients excited by missing information in the neutrino particle initialisation procedure, which restricts the particle conversion to z $\gtrsim 19$ if percent-level resolution is desired.

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arXiv2022

Effects of Hawking evaporation on PBH distributions

Primordial black holes (PBHs) may lose mass by Hawking evaporation. For sufficiently small PBHs, they may lose a large portion of their formation mass by today, or evaporate completely if they form with mass $M<M_\mathrm{crit}\sim5\times10^{14}~\mathrm{g}$. We investigate the effect of this mass loss on extended PBH distributions, showing that the shape of the distribution is significantly changed between formation and today. We reconsider the $γ$-ray constraints on PBH dark matter in the Milky Way center with a correctly `evolved' lognormal distribution, and derive a semi-analytic time-dependent distribution which can be used to accurately project monochromatic constraints to extended distribution constraints. We also derive the rate of black hole explosions in the Milky Way per year, finding that although there can be a significant number, it is extremely unlikely to find one close enough to Earth to observe. Along with a more careful argument for why monochromatic PBH distributions are unlikely to source an exploding PBH population today, we (unfortunately) conclude that we are unlikely to witness any PBH explosions.

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arXiv2020

The full Boltzmann hierarchy for dark matter-massive neutrino interactions

The impact of dark matter-neutrino interactions on the measurement of the cosmological parameters has been investigated in the past in the context of massless neutrinos exclusively. Here we revisit the role of a neutrino-dark matter coupling in light of ongoing cosmological tensions by implementing the full Boltzmann hierarchy for three massive neutrinos. Our tightest 95% CL upper limit on the strength of the interactions, parameterized via $u_χ=\frac{σ_0}{σ_{Th}}\left(\frac{m_χ}{100 \text{GeV}}\right)^{-1}$, is $u_χ\leq3.34 \cdot 10^{-4}$, arising from a combination of Planck TTTEEE data, Planck lensing data and SDSS BAO data. This upper bound is, as expected, slightly higher than previous results for interacting massless neutrinos, due to the correction factor associated with neutrino masses. We find that these interactions significantly relax the lower bounds on the value of $σ_8$ that is inferred in the context of $Λ$CDM from the Planck data, leading to agreement within 1-2$σ$ with weak lensing estimates of $σ_8$, as those from KiDS-1000. However, the presence of these interactions barely affects the value of the Hubble constant $H_0$.

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