arXiv subjects

Nathan Whitehorn

Publications and source records attributed to Nathan Whitehorn.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An Evolving Leptonic Jet Model for Delayed Radio Flares in Neutrino Blazars

The jets of blazar active galactic nuclei (AGN) are promising sites of hadron acceleration and subsequent neutrino production, owing to their extreme intrinsic power and high radiation density. Potential associations of IceCube neutrinos with blazars displaying delayed radio flares, such as TXS~0506+056 and PKS~1424+240, may support this scenario. However, the mechanisms and location of particle acceleration in the jet remain unclear. The 2017 IceCube event associated with TXS 0506+056 was concurrent with the initial peak of a flare in gamma rays, followed by a longer flare at radio frequencies peaking three years later. State-of-the-art single-zone radiative source models focus on the compact high-energy-emitting region, and thus fail to describe this subsequent radio enhancement. In this work, we model the time-domain multi-frequency evolution of TXS 0506+056 by considering electron emission along the physically extended jet. We couple a numerical particle interaction framework with a dynamic description of the temporal and spatial jet evolution down to the parsec scale. We fit the model to multi-wavelength data, including multi-frequency radio light curves. The results suggest that the parsec-scale jet meets a population of older, cooled electrons near the edge of the observable radio core, establishing a causal relation between the initial high-energy emission and trailing radio activity. This spatially and temporally resolved modeling approach can offer new insights into the physical conditions along the jet of flaring neutrino candidate blazars.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2022

Review of Radio Frequency Interference and Potential Impacts on the CMB-S4 Cosmic Microwave Background Survey

CMB-S4 will map the cosmic microwave background to unprecedented precision, while simultaneously surveying the millimeter-wave time-domain sky, in order to advance our understanding of cosmology and the universe. CMB-S4 will observe from two sites, the South Pole and the Atacama Desert of Chile. A combination of small- and large-aperture telescopes with hundreds of thousands of polarization-sensitive detectors will observe in several frequency bands from 20-300 GHz, surveying more than 50 percent of the sky to arcminute resolution with unprecedented sensitivity. CMB-S4 seeks to make a dramatic leap in sensitivity while observing across a broad range of largely unprotected spectrum which is increasingly being utilized for terrestrial and satellite transmissions. Fundamental aspects of CMB instrument technology leave them vulnerable to radio frequency interference (RFI) across a wide range of frequencies, including frequencies outside of their observing bands. Ground-based CMB instruments achieve their extraordinary sensitivities by deploying large focal planes of superconducting bolometers to extremely dry, high-altitude sites, with large fractional bandwidths, wide fields of view, and years of integration time. Suitable observing sites have historically offered significant protection from RFI, both naturally through their extremely remote locations as well as through restrictions on local emissions. Since the coupling mechanisms are complex, safe levels or frequencies of emission that would not interfere with CMB measurements cannot always be determined through straightforward calculations. We discuss models of interference for various types of RFI relevant to CMB-S4, mitigation strategies, and the potential impacts on survey sensitivity.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Constraining Cluster Virialization Mechanism and Cosmology using Thermal-SZ-selected clusters from Future CMB Surveys

We forecast the number of galaxy clusters that can be detected via the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) signals by future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, primarily the wide area survey of the CMB-S4 experiment but also CMB-S4's smaller delensing survey and the proposed CMB-HD experiment. We predict that CMB-S4 will detect 75,000 clusters with its wide survey of $f_{\rm sky}$ = 50% and 14,000 clusters with its deep survey of $f_{\rm sky}$ = 3%. Of these, approximately 1350 clusters will be at $z \ge 2$, a regime that is difficult to probe by optical or X-ray surveys. We assume CMB-HD will survey the same sky as the S4-Wide{}, and find that CMB-HD will detect $\times3$ more overall and an order of magnitude more $z \ge 2$ clusters than CMB-S4. These results include galactic and extragalactic foregrounds along with atmospheric and instrumental noise. Using CMB-cluster lensing to calibrate cluster tSZ-mass scaling relation, we combine cluster counts with primary CMB to obtain cosmological constraints for a two parameter extension of the standard model ($ΛCDM+\sum m_ν+w_{0}$). Besides constraining $σ(w_{0})$ to $\lesssim 1\%$, we find that both surveys can enable a $\sim 2.5-4.5σ$ detection of $\sum m_ν$, substantially strengthening CMB-only constraints. We also study the evolution of intracluster medium by modelling the cluster virialization ${\rm v}(z)$ and find tight constraints from CMB-S4, with further factors of 3-4 improvement for CMB-HD. The binned cluster counts, Fisher matrices, and other associated products can be downloaded from https://github.com/sriniraghunathan/tSZ_cluster_forecasts.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Contribution of Secondary Neutrinos from Line-of-sight Cosmic Ray Interactions to the IceCube Diffuse Astrophysical Flux

In ten years of observations, the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed a neutrino sky in tension with previous expectations for neutrino point source emissions. Astrophysical objects associated with hadronic processes might act as production sites for neutrinos, observed as point sources at Earth. Instead, a nearly isotropic flux of astrophysical neutrinos is observed up to PeV energies, prompting a reassessment of the assumed transport and production physics. This work applies a new physical explanation for neutrino production from populations of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and starburst galaxies to three years of public IceCube point source data. Specifically, cosmic rays (CRs) produced at such sources might interact with extragalactic background light and gas along the line of sight, generating a secondary neutrino flux. This model is tested alongside a number of typical flux weighting schemes, in all cases the all-sky flux contribution being constrained to percent levels of the reported IceCube diffuse astrophysical flux.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Anomalous Frequency Noise from the Megahertz Channelizing Resonators in Frequency-Division Multiplexed Transition Edge Sensor Readout

Superconducting lithographed resonators have a broad range of current and potential applications in the multiplexed readout of cryogenic detectors. Here, we focus on LC bandpass filters with resonances in the 1-5 MHz range used in the transition edge sensor (TES) bolometer readout of the Simons Array cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment. In this readout scheme, each detector signal amplitude-modulates a sinusoidal carrier tone at the resonance frequency of the detector's accompanying LC filter. Many modulated signals are transmitted over the same wire pair, and quadrature demodulation recovers the complex detector signal. We observe a noise in the resonant frequencies of the LC filters, which presents primarily as a current-dependent noise in the quadrature component after demodulation. This noise has a rich phenomenology, bearing many similarities to that of two-level system (TLS) noise observed in similar resonators in the GHz regime. These similarities suggest a common physical origin, thereby offering a new regime in which the underlying physics might be probed. We further describe an observed non-orthogonality between this noise and the detector responsivities, and present laboratory measurements that bound the resulting sensitivity penalty expected in the Simons Array. From these results, we do not anticipate this noise to appreciably affect the overall Simons Array sensitivity, nor do we expect it to limit future implementations.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2020

The Gravitational Lensing Signatures of BOSS Voids in the Cosmic Microwave Background

We report a $5.3σ$ detection of the gravitational lensing effect of cosmic voids from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic (BOSS) Data Release 12 seen in the $Planck$ 2018 cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing convergence map. To make this detection, we introduce new optimal techniques for void stacking and filtering of the CMB maps, such as binning voids by a combination of their observed galaxy density and size to separate those with distinctive lensing signatures. We calibrate theoretical expectations for the void-lensing signal using mock catalogs generated in a suite of 108 full-sky lensing simulations from Takahashi et al. (2017). Relative to these templates, we measure the lensing amplitude parameter in the data to be $A_L=1.10 \pm 0.21$ using a matched-filter stacking technique, and confirm it using an alternative Wiener filtering method. We demonstrate that the result is robust against thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich contamination and other sources of systematics. We use the lensing measurements to test the relationship between the matter and galaxy distributions within voids, and show that the assumption of linear bias with a value consistent with galaxy clustering results is discrepant with observation at $\sim 3σ$; we explain why such a result is consistent with simulations and previous results, and is expected as a consequence of void selection effects. We forecast the potential for void-CMB lensing measurements in future data from the Advanced ACT, Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 experiments, showing that, for the same number of voids, the achievable precision improves by a factor of more than two compared to $Planck$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

An Inpainting Approach to Tackle the Kinematic and Thermal SZ Induced Biases in CMB-Cluster Lensing Estimators

A galaxy cluster's own Sunyaev-Zel{'}dovich (SZ) signal is known to be a major contaminant when reconstructing the cluster's underlying lensing potential using cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps. In this work, we develop a modified quadratic estimator (QE) that is designed to mitigate the lensing biases due to the kinematic and thermal SZ effects. The idea behind the approach is to use inpainting to eliminate the cluster's own emission from the large-scale CMB gradient map. In this inpainted gradient map, we fill the pixel values at the cluster location using a constrained Gaussian realization based on the information from surrounding regions. We show that the noise induced due to inpainting process is small compared to other noise sources for upcoming surveys and has minimal impact on the final lensing signal-to-noise. Without any foreground cleaning, we find a stacked mass uncertainty of 6.5% for the CMB-S4 experiment on a cluster sample containing 5000 clusters with $M_{200c} = 2 \times 10^{14}\ M_{\odot}$ at z = 0.7. In addition to the SZ-induced lensing biases, we also quantify the low mass bias arising due to the contamination of the CMB gradient by the cluster convergence. For the fiducial cluster sample considered in this work, we find that bias is negligible compared to the statistical uncertainties for both the standard and the modified QE even when modes up to $\sim 2700$ are used for the gradient estimation. With more gradient modes, we demonstrate that the sensitivity can be increased by 14% compared to the fiducial result above with gradient modes up to $2000$

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

A Unique Messenger to Probe Active Galactic Nuclei: High-Energy Neutrinos

This Astro2020 white paper advocates for a multi-messenger approach that combines high-energy neutrino and broad multi-wavelength electromagnetic observations to study AGN during the coming decade. The unique capabilities of these joint observations promise to solve several long-standing issues in our understanding of AGN as powerful cosmic accelerators.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2018

Optical Characterization of the SPT-3G Focal Plane

The third-generation South Pole Telescope camera is designed to measure the cosmic microwave background across three frequency bands (95, 150 and 220 GHz) with ~16,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers. Each multichroic pixel on a detector wafer has a broadband sinuous antenna that couples power to six TESs, one for each of the three observing bands and both polarization directions, via lumped element filters. Ten detector wafers populate the focal plane, which is coupled to the sky via a large-aperture optical system. Here we present the frequency band characterization with Fourier transform spectroscopy, measurements of optical time constants, beam properties, and optical and polarization efficiencies of the focal plane. The detectors have frequency bands consistent with our simulations, and have high average optical efficiency which is 86%, 77% and 66% for the 95, 150 and 220 GHz detectors. The time constants of the detectors are mostly between 0.5 ms and 5 ms. The beam is round with the correct size, and the polarization efficiency is more than 90% for most of the bolometers

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Making maps of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization for B-mode studies: the POLARBEAR example

Analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) datasets typically requires some filtering of the raw time-ordered data. Filtering is frequently used to minimize the impact of low frequency noise, atmospheric contributions and/or scan synchronous signals on the resulting maps. In this work we explicitly construct a general filtering operator, which can unambiguously remove any set of unwanted modes in the data, and then amend the map-making procedure in order to incorporate and correct for it. We show that such an approach is mathematically equivalent to the solution of a problem in which the sky signal and unwanted modes are estimated simultaneously and the latter are marginalized over. We investigate the conditions under which this amended map-making procedure can render an unbiased estimate of the sky signal in realistic circumstances. We then study the effects of time-domain filtering on the noise correlation structure in the map domain, as well as impact it may have on the performance of the popular pseudo-spectrum estimators. We conclude that although maps produced by the proposed estimators arguably provide the most faithful representation of the sky possible given the data, they may not straightforwardly lead to the best constraints on the power spectra of the underlying sky signal and special care may need to be taken to ensure this is the case. By contrast, simplified map-makers which do not explicitly correct for time-domain filtering, but leave it to subsequent steps in the data analysis, may perform equally well and be easier and faster to implement. We focus on polarization-sensitive measurements targeting the B-mode component of the CMB signal and apply the proposed methods to realistic simulations based on characteristics of an actual CMB polarization experiment, POLARBEAR.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

CMB-S4 Science Book, First Edition

This book lays out the scientific goals to be addressed by the next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background experiment, CMB-S4, envisioned to consist of dedicated telescopes at the South Pole, the high Chilean Atacama plateau and possibly a northern hemisphere site, all equipped with new superconducting cameras. CMB-S4 will dramatically advance cosmological studies by crossing critical thresholds in the search for the B-mode polarization signature of primordial gravitational waves, in the determination of the number and masses of the neutrinos, in the search for evidence of new light relics, in constraining the nature of dark energy, and in testing general relativity on large scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

POLARBEAR Constraints on Cosmic Birefringence and Primordial Magnetic Fields

We constrain anisotropic cosmic birefringence using four-point correlations of even-parity $E$-mode and odd-parity $B$-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background measurements made by the POLARization of the Background Radiation (POLARBEAR) experiment in its first season of observations. We find that the anisotropic cosmic birefringence signal from any parity-violating processes is consistent with zero. The Faraday rotation from anisotropic cosmic birefringence can be compared with the equivalent quantity generated by primordial magnetic fields if they existed. The POLARBEAR nondetection translates into a 95% confidence level (C.L.) upper limit of 93 nanogauss (nG) on the amplitude of an equivalent primordial magnetic field inclusive of systematic uncertainties. This four-point correlation constraint on Faraday rotation is about 15 times tighter than the upper limit of 1380 nG inferred from constraining the contribution of Faraday rotation to two-point correlations of $B$-modes measured by Planck in 2015. Metric perturbations sourced by primordial magnetic fields would also contribute to the $B$-mode power spectrum. Using the POLARBEAR measurements of the $B$-mode power spectrum (two-point correlation), we set a 95% C.L. upper limit of 3.9 nG on primordial magnetic fields assuming a flat prior on the field amplitude. This limit is comparable to what was found in the Planck 2015 two-point correlation analysis with both temperature and polarization. We perform a set of systematic error tests and find no evidence for contamination. This work marks the first time that anisotropic cosmic birefringence or primordial magnetic fields have been constrained from the ground at subdegree scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Penalized Splines for Smooth Representation of High-dimensional Monte Carlo Datasets

Detector response to a high-energy physics process is often estimated by Monte Carlo simulation. For purposes of data analysis, the results of this simulation are typically stored in large multi-dimensional histograms, which can quickly become both too large to easily store and manipulate and numerically problematic due to unfilled bins or interpolation artifacts. We describe here an application of the penalized spline technique to efficiently compute B-spline representations of such tables and discuss aspects of the resulting B-spline fits that simplify many common tasks in handling tabulated Monte Carlo data in high-energy physics analysis, in particular their use in maximum-likelihood fitting.

physics.data-an↗