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Martina Gerbino

Publications and source records attributed to Martina Gerbino.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Exact map-space beam convolution via spin-mapmaking

Forthcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments are targeting ambitious science goals, including the exploration of the particle content of the Universe across cosmic times and the search for the faint signal from primordial gravitational waves. To pursue these goals, CMB experiments will house an unprecedented high number of detectors that will dramatically enhance their sensitivity. This will in turn require a tight control of instrumental systematics, demanding efficient and precise simulation of systematic effects. Leveraging spin-mapmaking, we present a map-based method to propagate beam convolution systematics to the map-level, especially well-suited for main-beam studies. From the scanning strategy information compressed into precomputed h-maps and the beam and sky harmonic coefficients, our method directly outputs beam convolved maps. We validate against pixel-centered TOD-level 4π convolution for circular, elliptical, and Planck HFI scanning beams, demonstrating that our method retains agreement to numerical precision, while operating in map space. This formalism enables efficient simulation of beam convolution systematics across the full focal plane of upcoming experiments. As a first practical application, we demonstrate the ability to efficiently produce beam-convolved simulated Planck maps, showing excellent agreement with the QuickPol pipeline at the power-spectrum level. We release a public code, Smarties4Planck, to easily generate such maps for broader use.

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Sensitivity of Next-Generation CMB Surveys to Neutrinos and Other Light Relics

Neutrinos and other light relics leave characteristic imprints in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, making their observation a sensitive probe of the particle content and thermal history of the early universe. The energy density in these relativistic species is parameterized by their effective number $N_\mathrm{eff}$. Measuring this parameter at the percent level, which is a long-standing science goal of CMB-S4 and other experiments, would test a wide range of well-motivated physics within and beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In this paper, we present Fisher-matrix forecasts of the projected sensitivity to $N_\mathrm{eff}$ of several CMB-S4 survey configurations considered during its extensive design phase. The conceptual design reaches $σ(N_\mathrm{eff}) < 0.03$ over its seven-year observing period, while the revised configuration achieves the same precision over a longer timescale. We complement these results with a cosmic-variance-limited survey over the same multipole range to quantify the room for improvement accessible with additional instrumental, observational, and theoretical efforts. Finally, we discuss the broad implications of precise $N_\mathrm{eff}$ measurements for the radiation sector, big bang nucleosynthesis, light thermal relics, and other early-universe physics. The forecasts presented in this work are performed with the publicly released DRAFT (Dark Radiation Anisotropy Flowdown Team) tool. It provides an end-to-end pipeline from simulated foreground maps and component separation to delensing and projected sensitivities for any cosmological parameter, and it can be directly applied to other cosmic microwave background survey designs.

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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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Beyond thermal approximations: Precise cosmological bounds on Axion-Like Particles

We derive updated cosmological bounds on light axion-like particles (ALPs) coupled to leptons or photons, using a full phase-space treatment of their production from the primordial thermal plasma. The ALP phase-space distribution, obtained by solving the momentum-dependent Boltzmann equation for the relevant production processes, is consistently propagated into the computation of cosmological observables, allowing us to assess the impact of non-thermal spectral distortions on the effective number of relativistic species, $ΔN_{\rm eff}$. Using state-of-the-art measurements of the cosmic microwave background from Planck, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope, complemented with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis determinations of primordial deuterium and helium abundances, we obtain the following 95\% credible limits on the ALP decay constant: $f_a > 1.63 \times 10^6 \, {\rm GeV}$, $9.41 \times 10^6 \, {\rm GeV}$ and $8.06 \times 10^4 \, {\rm GeV}$ for ALPs coupled to electrons, muons and taus, respectively. For the ALP-photon coupling we find $g_{aγ} < 1.98 \times 10^{-8} \, {\rm GeV}^{-1}$. Including baryon acoustic oscillation data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument mildly relaxes the constraints, in line with previous analyses of extra relativistic degrees of freedom. Finally, we present forecasts for the LiteBIRD$+$Simons Observatory and LiteBIRD$+$CMB-HD configurations, discussing the importance of an exact phase-space treatment for robust cosmological bounds on ALP interactions.

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Accurate and efficient likelihood modeling for large-scale CMB data

Accurate parameter estimation from cosmic microwave background data requires reliable likelihood modeling, particularly at large angular scales where angular power spectrum estimators exhibit non-Gaussian statistics. We present a novel approach, based on the Hamimeche-Lewis formalism, that marginalizes over auto-spectra, thus reducing residual biases from noise misestimation and partial sky coverage. We validate our approach by simulating three independent CMB channels, or data splits, in a multi-field setting, comparing to the pixel-based likelihood ground truth estimates for the optical depth $τ$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. We benchmark our method against the main power spectrum based alternatives available in the literature, showing that it outperforms all of them in terms of accuracy, while remaining fast and computationally efficient.

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The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics

The standard model of cosmology has provided a good phenomenological description of a wide range of observations both at astrophysical and cosmological scales for several decades. This concordance model is constructed by a universal cosmological constant and supported by a matter sector described by the standard model of particle physics and a cold dark matter contribution, as well as very early-time inflationary physics, and underpinned by gravitation through general relativity. There have always been open questions about the soundness of the foundations of the standard model. However, recent years have shown that there may also be questions from the observational sector with the emergence of differences between certain cosmological probes. In this White Paper, we identify the key objectives that need to be addressed over the coming decade together with the core science projects that aim to meet these challenges. These discordances primarily rest on the divergence in the measurement of core cosmological parameters with varying levels of statistical confidence. These possible statistical tensions may be partially accounted for by systematics in various measurements or cosmological probes but there is also a growing indication of potential new physics beyond the standard model. After reviewing the principal probes used in the measurement of cosmological parameters, as well as potential systematics, we discuss the most promising array of potential new physics that may be observable in upcoming surveys. We also discuss the growing set of novel data analysis approaches that go beyond traditional methods to test physical models. [Abridged]

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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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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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Strong cosmological constraints on the neutrino magnetic moment

A sizable magnetic moment for neutrinos would be evidence of exotic physics. In the early Universe, left-handed neutrinos with a magnetic moment would interact with electromagnetic fields in the primordial plasma, flipping their helicity and producing a population of right-handed (RH) neutrinos. In this work, we present a new calculation of the production rate of RH neutrinos in a multi-component primordial plasma and quantify their contribution to the total energy density of relativistic species at early times, stressing the implications of the dependence on the initial time for production. We find that current cosmological data exclude values of the magnetic moment $μ\gtrsim 1.6\times 10^{-11}~μ_B$, while future cosmological experiments will be able to probe non-thermal production of RH neutrinos, becoming competitive with stellar limits.

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A halo model approach to describe clustering and emission of the two main star forming galaxy populations for Cosmic Infrared Background studies

The Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB), traced by the emission from dusty star-forming galaxies, provides a crucial window into the phases of star formation throughout cosmic history. These galaxies, although challenging to detect individually at high redshifts due to their faintness, cumulatively contribute to the CIB which then becomes a powerful probe of galaxy formation, evolution and clustering. Here, we introduce a physically-motivated model for the CIB emission spanning a wide range of frequency and angular resolution, employing a halo model approach and distinguishing, within dark matter halos, between two main populations of star forming galaxies, i.e. normal late-type spiral and irregular galaxies and the progenitors of early-type galaxies. The emission from two galaxy populations maps into different regimes in frequency/resolution space, allowing us to constrain the clustering parameters of the model - $M_{\text{min}}$, the mass of a halo with 50% probability of having a central galaxy and $α$, the power law index regulating the number of satellite galaxies - through a fit to Planck and Herschel-SPIRE CIB anisotropy measurements. We find that, while being able to place constraints on some of the clustering parameters, the Planck frequency and multipole coverage cannot effectively disentangle the contributions from the two galaxy populations. On the other side, the Herschel-SPIRE measurements separate out and constrain the clustering of both populations. Our work, though, highlights an inconsistency of the results between the two datasets, partially already reported in other literature and still not understood.

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Constraining UV freeze-in of light relics with current and next-generation CMB observations

Cosmological observations allow to measure the abundance of light relics produced in the early Universe. Most studies focus on the thermal freeze-out scenario, yet light relics produced by freeze-in are generic for models in which new light degrees of freedom do not couple strongly enough to the Standard Model (SM) plasma to allow for full thermalization in the early Universe. In ultraviolet (UV) freeze-in scenarios, rates for light relic production associated with non-renormalizable interactions typical of beyond the SM (BSM) models grow with temperature more quickly than the Hubble rate. Thus, relatively small couplings to the SM can be probed by current and next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate several representative benchmark BSM models, such as axion-like particles from Primakoff production, massless dark photons and light right-handed neutrinos. We calculate contributions to the effective number of neutrino species, $ΔN_{\rm eff}$, in corners of parameter space not previously considered and discuss the sensitivity of CMB experiments compared to other probes. In contrast to freeze-out scenarios, $ΔN_{\rm eff}$ from UV freeze-in is more dependent on both the specific BSM physics model and the reheating temperature. Depending on the details of the BSM scenario, we find that the sensitivity of next-generation CMB experiments can complement or surpass the current astrophysical, laboratory or collider constraints on the couplings of the SM to the light relic.

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Synergy between cosmological and laboratory searches in neutrino physics

The intersection of the cosmic and neutrino frontiers is a rich field where much discovery space still remains. Neutrinos play a pivotal role in the hot big bang cosmology, influencing the dynamics of the universe over numerous decades in cosmological history. Recent studies have made tremendous progress in understanding some properties of cosmological neutrinos, primarily their energy density. Upcoming cosmological probes will measure the energy density of relativistic particles with higher precision, but could also start probing other properties of the neutrino spectra. When convolved with results from terrestrial experiments, cosmology can become even more acute at probing new physics related to neutrinos or even Beyond the Standard Model (BSM). Any discordance between laboratory and cosmological data sets may reveal new BSM physics and/or suggest alternative models of cosmology. We give examples of the intersection between terrestrial and cosmological probes in the neutrino sector, and briefly discuss the possibilities of what different laboratory experiments may see in conjunction with cosmological observatories.

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Probing Lorentz-violating electrodynamics with CMB polarization

We perform a comprehensive study of the signatures of Lorentz violation in electrodynamics on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. In the framework of the minimal Standard Model Extension (SME), we consider effects generated by renormalizable operators, both CPT-odd and CPT-even. These operators are responsible for sourcing, respectively, cosmic birefringence and circular polarization. We propagate jointly the effects of all the relevant Lorentz-violating parameters to CMB observables and provide constraints with the most recent CMB datasets. We bound the CPT-even coefficient to $k_{F,E+B} < 2.31 \times 10^{-31}$ at 95\% CL. This improves previous CMB bounds by one order of magnitude. The limits we obtain on the CPT-odd coefficients, i.e. $|k_{(V)00}^{(3)}| < 1.54 \times 10^{-44} \; {\rm GeV}$ and $|\mathbf{k_{AF}}| < 0.74 \times 10^{-44} \; {\rm GeV}$ at 95\% CL, are respectively one and two orders of magnitude stronger than previous CMB-based limits, superseding also bounds from non-CMB searches. This analysis provides the strongest constraints to date on CPT-violating coefficients in the minimal SME from CMB searches.

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Novel cosmological bounds on thermally-produced axion-like particles

We constrain the coupling of thermally-produced axion-like particles (here axions) with photons and gluons, using data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectra and baryon acoustic oscillations. The axion possesses an explicit soft breaking mass term and it is produced thermally in the early Universe from either axion-photon or axion-gluon processes, accounting for the recent progresses in the field. We derive the most stringent bounds on the axion-gluon coupling to date on the mass range considered $10^{-4} \lesssim m_a/{\rm eV} \lesssim 100$, superseding the current bounds from SN1987A. The bounds on the axion-photon coupling are competitive with the results from the CAST collaboration for the axion mass $m_a \gtrsim 3\,$eV. We comment on the forecast reaches that will be available given the sensitivity of future CMB-S4 missions.

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Neutrino mass and mass ordering: No conclusive evidence for normal ordering

The extraction of the neutrino mass ordering is one of the major challenges in particle physics and cosmology, not only for its implications for a fundamental theory of mass generation in nature, but also for its decisive role in the scale of future neutrinoless double beta decay experimental searches. It has been recently claimed that current oscillation, beta decay and cosmological limits on the different observables describing the neutrino mass parameter space provide robust decisive Bayesian evidence in favor of the normal ordering of the neutrino mass spectrum [arXiv:2203.14247]. We further investigate these strong claims using a rich and wide phenomenology, with different sampling techniques of the neutrino parameter space. Contrary to the findings of Jimenez et al [arXiv:2203.14247], no decisive evidence for the normal mass ordering is found. Neutrino mass ordering analyses must rely on priors and parameterizations that are ordering-agnostic: robust results should be regarded as those in which the preference for the normal neutrino mass ordering is driven exclusively by the data, while we find a difference of up to a factor of 33 in the Bayes factors among the different priors and parameterizations exploited here. An ordering-agnostic prior would be represented by the case of parameterizations sampling over the two mass splittings and a mass scale, or those sampling over the individual neutrino masses via normal prior distributions only. In this regard, we show that the current significance in favor of the normal mass ordering should be taken as $2.7σ$ (i.e. moderate evidence), mostly driven by neutrino oscillation data.

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Neutrino Self-Interactions: A White Paper

Neutrinos are the Standard Model (SM) particles which we understand the least, often due to how weakly they interact with the other SM particles. Beyond this, very little is known about interactions among the neutrinos, i.e., their self-interactions. The SM predicts neutrino self-interactions at a level beyond any current experimental capabilities, leaving open the possibility for beyond-the-SM interactions across many energy scales. In this white paper, we review the current knowledge of neutrino self-interactions from a vast array of probes, from cosmology, to astrophysics, to the laboratory. We also discuss theoretical motivations for such self-interactions, including neutrino masses and possible connections to dark matter. Looking forward, we discuss the capabilities of searches in the next generation and beyond, highlighting the possibility of future discovery of this beyond-the-SM physics.

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Detailed study of HWP non-idealities and their impact on future measurements of CMB polarization anisotropies from space

We study the propagation of a specific class of instrumental systematics to the reconstruction of the B-mode power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We focus on the non-idealities of the half-wave plate (HWP), a polarization modulator that is to be deployed by future CMB experiments, such as the phase-A satellite mission LiteBIRD. We study the effects of non-ideal HWP properties, such as transmittance, phase shift, and cross-polarization. To this end, we developed a simple, yet stand-alone end-to-end simulation pipeline adapted to LiteBIRD. We analyzed the effects of a possible mismatch between the measured frequency profiles of HWP properties (used in the mapmaking stage of the pipeline) and the actual profiles (used in the sky-scanning step). We simulated single-frequency, CMB-only observations to emphasize the effects of non-idealities on the BB power spectrum. We also considered multi-frequency observations to account for the frequency dependence of HWP properties and the contribution of foreground emission. We quantified the systematic effects in terms of a bias $Δr$ on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, with respect to the ideal case without systematic effects. We derived the accuracy requirements on the measurements of HWP properties by requiring $Δr < 10^{-5}$ (1% of the expected LiteBIRD sensitivity on $r$). Our analysis is introduced by a detailed presentation of the mathematical formalism employed in this work, including the use of the Jones and Mueller matrix representations.

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In-flight polarization angle calibration for LiteBIRD: blind challenge and cosmological implications

We present a demonstration of the in-flight polarization angle calibration for the JAXA/ISAS second strategic large class mission, LiteBIRD, and estimate its impact on the measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio parameter, r, using simulated data. We generate a set of simulated sky maps with CMB and polarized foreground emission, and inject instrumental noise and polarization angle offsets to the 22 (partially overlapping) LiteBIRD frequency channels. Our in-flight angle calibration relies on nulling the EB cross correlation of the polarized signal in each channel. This calibration step has been carried out by two independent groups with a blind analysis, allowing an accuracy of the order of a few arc-minutes to be reached on the estimate of the angle offsets. Both the corrected and uncorrected multi-frequency maps are propagated through the foreground cleaning step, with the goal of computing clean CMB maps. We employ two component separation algorithms, the Bayesian-Separation of Components and Residuals Estimate Tool (B-SeCRET), and the Needlet Internal Linear Combination (NILC). We find that the recovered CMB maps obtained with algorithms that do not make any assumptions about the foreground properties, such as NILC, are only mildly affected by the angle miscalibration. However, polarization angle offsets strongly bias results obtained with the parametric fitting method. Once the miscalibration angles are corrected by EB nulling prior to the component separation, both component separation algorithms result in an unbiased estimation of the r parameter. While this work is motivated by the conceptual design study for LiteBIRD, its framework can be broadly applied to any CMB polarization experiment. In particular, the combination of simulation plus blind analysis provides a robust forecast by taking into account not only detector sensitivity but also systematic effects.

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