arXiv subjects

Pengjie Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Pengjie Zhang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Separating the Intrinsic Alignment Signal and the Lensing Signal using Self-Calibration in Photo-z Surveys with KiDS450 and KV450 Data

To reach the full potential for the next generation of weak lensing surveys, it is necessary to mitigate the contamination of intrinsic alignments (IA) of galaxies in the observed cosmic shear signal. The self calibration (SC) of intrinsic alignments provides an independent method to measure the IA signal from the survey data and the photometric redshift information. It operates differently from the marginalization method based on IA modeling. In this work, we present the first application of SC to the KiDS450 data and the KV450 data, to split directly the intrinsic shape - galaxy density (Ig) correlation signal and the gravitational shear - galaxy density (Gg) correlation signal, using the information from photometric redshift (photo-z). We achieved a clear separation of the two signals and performed several validation tests. Our measured signals are found to be in general agreement with the KiDS450 cosmic shear best-fit cosmology, for both lensing and IA measurements. For KV450, we use partial (high-z) data, and our lensing measurements are also in good agreement with KV450 cosmic shear best-fit, however, our IA signal suggests a larger IA amplitude. We discussed the impact of photo-z quality on IA detection and several other potential systematic biases. Finally, we discuss the potential application of the information extracted for both the lensing signal and the IA signal in future surveys.

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arXiv2020

Forecast for FAST: from Galaxies Survey to Intensity Mapping

The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope(FAST) is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. In this paper, we make forecast on the FAST HI large scale structure survey by mock observations. We consider a drift scan survey with the L-band 19 beam receiver, which may be commensal with the pulsar search and Galactic HI survey. We also consider surveys at lower frequency, either using the current single feed wide band receiver, or a future multi-beam phased array feed (PAF) in the UHF band. We estimate the number density of detected HI galaxies and the measurement error in positions, the precision of the surveys are evaluated using both Fisher matrix and simulated observations. The measurement error in the HI galaxy power spectrum is estimated, and we find that the error is relatively large even at moderate redshifts, as the number of positively detected galaxies drops drastically with increasing redshift. However, good cosmological measurement could be obtained with the intensity mapping technique where the large scale HI distribution is measured without resolving individual galaxies. The figure of merit (FoM) for the dark energy equation of state with different observation times are estimated, we find that with the existing L-band multi-beam receiver, a good measurement of low redshift large scale structure can be obtained, which complements the existing optical surveys. With a PAF in the UHF band, the constraint can be much stronger, reaching the level of a dark energy task force (DETF) stage IV experiment.

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arXiv2020

Neutrino effects on the morphology of cosmic large-scale structure

In this work, we propose a powerful probe of neutrino effects on the large-scale structure (LSS) of the Universe, i.e., Minkowski functionals (MFs). The morphology of LSS can be fully described by four MFs. This tool, with strong statistical power, is robust to various systematics and can comprehensively probe all orders of N-point statistics. By using a pair of high-resolution N-body simulations, for the first time, we comprehensively studied the subtle neutrino effects on the morphology of LSS. For an ideal LSS survey of volume $\sim1.73$ Gpc$^3$/$h^3$, neutrino signals are mainly detected from void regions with a significant level up to $\thicksim 10σ$ and $\thicksim 300σ$ for CDM and total matter density fields, respectively. This demonstrates its enormous potential for much improving the neutrino mass constraint in the data analysis of up-coming ambitious LSS surveys.

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arXiv2019

Quantification of the multi-streaming effect in Redshift Space Distortion

Both multi-streaming (random motion) and bulk motion cause the Finger-of-God (FoG) effect in redshift space distortion (RSD). We apply a direct measurement of the multi-streaming effect in RSD from simulations, proving that it induces an additional, non-negligible FoG damping to the redshift space density power spectrum. We show that, including the multi-streaming effect, the RSD modelling is significantly improved. We also provide a theoretical explanation based on halo model for the measured effect, including a fitting formula with one to two free parameters. The improved understanding of FoG helps break the $fσ_8-σ_v$ degeneracy in RSD cosmology, and has the potential of significantly improving cosmological constraints.

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arXiv2019

ABS: an Analytical method of Blind Separation of CMB from foregrounds

Extracting CMB B-mode polarization from complicated foregrounds is a challenging task in searching for inflationary gravitational waves. We propose the ABS method as a blind and analytical solution to this problem. It applies to the measured cross bandpower between different frequency bands and obtains the CMB B-mode bandpower analytically. It does not rely on assumptions of foregrounds and does not require multiple parameter fitting. Testing against a variety of foregrounds, survey frequency configurations and instrument noise, we verify its applicability and numerical stability. The ABS method also applies to CMB temperature, E-mode polarization, the thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect, spectral distortion, and even significantly different problems such as cosmic magnification.

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arXiv2019

A possible explanation of vanishing halo velocity bias

Recently Chen et al. (2018, ApJ, 861, 58) accurately determined the volume weighted halo velocity bias in simulations, and found that the deviation of velocity bias from unity is much weaker than the peak model prediction. Here we present a possible explanation of this vanishing velocity bias. The starting point is that, halos are peaks in the low redshift {\it non-Gaussian} density field with smoothing scale $R_Δ$ (virial radius), instead of peaks in the high redshift initial {\it Gaussian} density field with a factor of $\mathcal{O}(Δ^{1/3})$ larger smoothing scale. Based on the approximation that the density field can be Gaussianized by a local and monotonic transformation, we extend the peak model to the non-Gaussian density field and derive the analytical expression of velocity dispersion and velocity power spectrum of these halos. The predicted deviation of velocity bias from unity is indeed much weaker than the previous prediction, and the agreement with the simulation results is significantly improved.

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arXiv2018

Accurate redshift determination of standard sirens by the luminosity distance space-redshift space large scale structure cross correlation

We point out a new possibility to determine the average redshift distribution of a large sample of gravitational wave standard sirens, without spectroscopic follow-ups. It is based on the cross correlation between the luminosity-distance space large scale structure (LSS) traced by standard sirens, and the redshift space LSS traced by galaxies in preexisting electromagnetic wave observations. We construct an unbiased and model independent estimator $E_z$ to realize this possibility. We demonstrate with BBO and Euclid that, $0.1\%$ accuracy in redshift determination can be achieved. This method can significantly alleviate the need of spectroscopic follow-up of standard sirens, and enhance their cosmological applications.

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arXiv2018

Testing the ABS method with the simulated Planck temperature maps

In this study, we apply the Analytical method of Blind Separation (ABS) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from foregrounds to estimate the CMB temperature power spectrum from multi-frequency microwave maps. We test the robustness of the ABS estimator and assess the accuracy of the power spectrum recovery by using realistic simulations based on the seven-frequency Planck data, including various frequency-dependent and spatially-varying foreground components (synchrotron, free-free, thermal dust and anomalous microwave emission), as well as an uncorrelated Gaussian-distributed instrumental noise. Considering no prior information about the foregrounds, the ABS estimator can analytically recover the CMB power spectrum over almost all scales with less than $0.5\%$ error for maps where the Galactic plane region ($|b|<10^{\circ}$) is masked out. To further test the flexibility and effectiveness of the ABS approach in a variety of situations, we apply the ABS to the simulated Planck maps in three cases: (1) without any mask, (2) imposing a two-times-stronger synchrotron emission and (3) including only the Galactic plane region ($|b|<10^{\circ}$) in the analysis. In such extreme cases, the ABS approach can still provide an unbiased estimate of band powers at the level of 1 $μ\rm{K}^2$ on average over all $\ell$ range, and the recovered powers are consistent with the input values within 1-$σ$ for most $\ell$ bins.

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arXiv2018

The large scale structure in the 3D luminosity-distance space and its cosmological applications

Future gravitational wave (GW) observations are capable of detecting millions of compact star binary mergers in extragalactic galaxies, with $1\%$ luminosity-distance ($D_L$) measurement accuracy and better than arcminute positioning accuracy. This will open a new window of the large scale structure (LSS) of the universe, in the 3D {\bf luminosity-distance space (LDS)}, instead of the 3D redshift space of galaxy spectroscopic surveys. The baryon acoustic oscillation and the AP test encoded in the LDS LSS constrain the $D_L$-$D^{\rm co}_A$ (comoving angular diameter distance) relation and therefore the expansion history of the universe. Peculiar velocity induces the LDS distortion, analogous to the redshift space distortion, and allows for a new structure growth measure $f_Lσ_8$. When the distance duality is enforced ($1+z=D_L/D^{\rm co}_A$), the LDS LSS by itself determines the redshift to $\sim 1\%$ level accuracy, and alleviates the need of spectroscopic follow-up of GW events.But a more valuable application is to test the distance duality to $1\%$ level accuracy, in combination with conventional BAO and supernovae measurements. This will put stringent constraints on modified gravity models in which the gravitational wave $D^{\rm GW}_L$ deviates from the electromagnetic wave $D^{EM}_L$. All these applications require no spectroscopic follow-ups.

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arXiv2018

Verifications of scaling relations useful for the intrinsic alignment self-calibration

The galaxy intrinsic alignment (IA) is a major challenge of weak lensing cosmology. To alleviate this problem, Zhang (2010, MNRAS, 406, L95) proposed a self-calibration method, independent of IA modeling. This proposal relies on several scaling relations between two-point clustering of IA and matter/galaxy fields, which were previously only tested with analytical IA models. In this paper, these relations are tested comprehensively with an $N$-body simulation of $3072^3$ simulation particles and boxsize 600 $h^{-1} \, \mathrm{Mpc}$. They are verified at the accuracy level of $\mathcal{O}(1)\%$ over angular scales and source redshifts of interest. We further confirm that these scaling relations are generic, insensitive to halo mass, weighting in defining halo ellipticities, photo-$z$ error, and misalignment between galaxy ellipticities and halo ellipticities. We also present and verify three new scaling relations on the B-mode IA. These results consolidate and complete the theory side of the proposed self-calibration technique.

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arXiv2018

Accurate determination of halo velocity bias in simulations and its cosmological implications

A long-standing issue in peculiar velocity cosmology is whether the halo/galaxy velocity bias $b_v=1$ at large scale. The resolution of this important issue must resort to high precision cosmological simulations. However, this is hampered by another long-standing `sampling artifact' problem in volume weighted velocity measurement. We circumvent this problem with a hybrid approach. We first measure statistics free of sampling artifact, then link them to volume weighted statistics in theory, finally solve for the velocity bias. $b_v$ determined by our method is not only free of sampling artifact, but also free of cosmic variance. We apply this method to a $Λ$CDM N-body simulation of $3072^3$ particles and $1200 Mpc/{\rm h}$ box size. For the first time, we determine the halo velocity bias to $0.1\%$-$1\%$ accuracy. Our major findings are as follows: (1) $b_v\neq 1$ at $k>0.1 h/{\rm Mpc}$. The deviation from unity ($|b_v-1|$) increases with $k$. Depending on halo mass and redshift, it may reach $\mathcal{O}(0.01)$ at $k=0.2 h/{\rm Mpc}$ and $\mathcal{O}(0.05)$ at $k\sim 0.3 h/{\rm Mpc}$. The discovered $b_v\neq 1$ has statistically significant impact on structure growth rate measurement by spectroscopic redshift surveys, including DESI, Euclid and SKA. (2) Both the sign and the amplitude of $b_v-1$ depend on mass and redshift. These results disagree with the peak model prediction in that $b_v$ has much weaker deviation from unity, varies with redshift, and can be bigger than unity. (3) Most of the mass and redshift dependences can be compressed into a single dependence on the halo density bias. Based on this finding, we provide an approximate two-parameter fitting formula.

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arXiv2018

Weak lensing power spectrum reconstruction by counting galaxies.-- II: Improving the ABS method with the shift parameter

In paper I of this series (Yang et al. 2017, ApJ), we proposed an analytical method of blind separation ({\bf ABS}) to extract the cosmic magnification signal in galaxy number distribution and reconstruct the weak lensing power spectrum. Here we report a new version of the ABS method, with significantly improved performance. This version is characterized by a shift parameter $\mathcal{S}$, with the special case of $\mathcal{S}=0$ corresponding to the original ABS method. We have tested this new version, compared to the previous one, and confirmed its supreme performance in all investigated situations. Therefore it supersedes the previous version. The proof of concept studies presented in this paper demonstrate that it may enable surveys such as LSST and SKA to reconstruct the lensing power spectrum at $z\simeq 1$ with $1\%$ accuracy. We will test with more realistic simulations to verify its applicability in real data.

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arXiv2017

Non-negative matrix factorization for self-calibration of photometric redshift scatter in weak lensing surveys

Photo-z error is one of the major sources of systematics degrading the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological inferences. Zhang et al. (2010) proposed a self-calibration method combining galaxy-galaxy correlations and galaxy-shear correlations between different photo-z bins. Fisher matrix analysis shows that it can determine the rate of photo-z outliers at a level of 0.01-1% merely using photometric data and do not rely on any prior knowledge. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to implement this method by solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem arising in the self-calibration process. Based on the techniques of fixed-point iteration and non-negative matrix factorization, the proposed algorithm can efficiently and robustly reconstruct the scattering probabilities between the true-z and photo-z bins. The algorithm has been tested extensively by applying it to mock data from simulated stage IV weak lensing projects. We find that the algorithm provides a successful recovery of the scatter rates at the level of 0.01-1%, and the true mean redshifts of photo-z bins at the level of 0.001, which may satisfy the requirements in future lensing surveys.

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arXiv2017

Weak lensing power spectrum reconstruction by counting galaxies.-- I: the ABS method

We propose an Analytical method of Blind Separation (ABS) of cosmic magnification from the intrinsic fluctuations of galaxy number density in the observed galaxy number density distribution. The ABS method utilizes the different dependences of the signal (cosmic magnification) and contamination (galaxy intrinsic clustering) on galaxy flux, to separate the two. It works directly on the measured cross galaxy angular power spectra between different flux bins. It determines/reconstructs the lensing power spectrum analytically, without assumptions of galaxy intrinsic clustering and cosmology. It is unbiased in the limit of infinite number of galaxies. In reality the lensing reconstruction accuracy depends on survey configurations, galaxy biases, and other complexities, due to finite number of galaxies and the resulting shot noise fluctuations in the cross galaxy power spectra. We estimate its performance (systematic and statistical errors) in various cases. We find that, stage IV dark energy surveys such as SKA and LSST are capable of reconstructing the lensing power spectrum at $z\simeq 1$ and $\ell\la 5000$ accurately. This lensing reconstruction only requires counting galaxies, and is therefore highly complementary to the cosmic shear measurement by the same surveys.

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arXiv2017

Peculiar Velocity Decomposition, Redshift Space Distortion and Velocity Reconstruction in Redshift Surveys. II. Dark Matter Velocity Statistics

Massive spectroscopic redshift surveys open a promising window to accurately measure peculiar velocity at cosmological distances through redshift space distortion (RSD). In paper I of this series of work we proposed to decompose peculiar velocity into three eigen-modes (v_δ, v_S and v_B) in order to facilitate the RSD modeling and peculiar velocity reconstruction. In the current paper we measure the dark matter RSD related statistics of the velocity eigen-modes through a set of N-body simulations, including the velocity power spectra, correlation functions, one-point probability distribution functions, cumulants and the damping functions describing the Finger of God effect. (1) The power spectrum measurement shows that these velocity components have distinctly different spatial distribution and redshift evolution. In particular, we measure the window function \tilde{W}(k,z), which describes the impact of nonlinear evolution on the v_δ-density relation. We confirm that it can induce a significant systematic error of O(10%) in RSD cosmology. We demonstrate that \tilde{W} can be accurately described by a simple fitting formula with one or two free parameters. (2) The correlation function measurement shows that the correlation length is O(100), O(10) and O(1) Mpc for v_δ, v_S and v_B respectively. These correlation lengths determine where we can treat the velocity fields as spatially uncorrelated. (3) The velocity PDFs and cumulants quantify non-Gaussianities of the velocity fields. We confirm speculation in paper I that v_δis largely Gaussian, nevertheless with non-negligible non-Gaussianity, v_B is significantly non-Gaussian. We also measure the damping functions. Despite the observed non-Gaussianities, the damping functions and hence the FOG effect are all well approximated as Gaussian ones at scales of interest.

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arXiv2017

Approaching the Cramer-Rao Bound in Weak Lensing with PDF Symmetrization

Weak lensing statistics is typically measured as weighted sum of shear estimators or their products (shear-shear correlation). The weighting schemes are designed in the hope of minimizing the statistical error without introducing systematic errors. It would be ideal to approach the Cramer-Rao bound (the lower bound of the statistical uncertainty) in shear statistics, though it is generally difficult to do so in practice. The reasons may include: difficulties in galaxy shape measurement, inaccurate knowledge of the probability-distribution-function (PDF) of the shear estimator, misidentification of point sources as galaxies, etc.. Using the shear estimators defined in Zhang et al. (2015), we show that one can overcome all these problems, and allow shear measurement accuracy to approach the Cramer-Rao bound. This can be achieved by symmetrizing the PDF of the shear estimator, or the joint PDF of shear estimator pairs (for shear-shear correlation), without any prior knowledge of the PDF. Using simulated galaxy images, we demonstrate that under general observing conditions, this idea works as expected: it minimizes the statistical uncertainty without introducing systematic error.

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arXiv2017

Kriging interpolating cosmic velocity field. II. Taking anistropies and multistreaming into account

Measuring the volume-weighted peculiar velocity statistics from inhomogeneously and sparsely distributed galaxies/halos, by existing velocity assignment methods, suffers from a significant sampling artifact. As an alternative, the Kriging interpolation based on Gaussian processes was introduced and evaluated [Y. Yu, J. Zhang, Y. Jing, and P. Zhang, Phys. Rev. D 92, 083527 (2015)]. Unfortunately, the most straightforward application of Kriging does not perform better than the existing methods in the literature. In this work, we investigate two physically motivated extensions. The first takes into account of the anisotropic velocity correlations. The second introduces the nugget effect, on account of multi-streaming of the velocity field. We find that the performance is indeed improved. For sparsely sampled data [$n_P\lesssim 6\times 10^{-3}(h^{-1} {\rm Mpc})^{-3}$] where the sampling artifact is the most severe, the improvement is significant and is two-fold: 1) The scale of reliable measurement of the velocity power spectrum is extended by a factor $\sim 1.6$, and 2) the dependence on the velocity correlation prior is weakened by a factor of $\sim 2$. We conclude that such extensions are desirable for accurate velocity assignment by Kriging.

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arXiv2016

Fast generation of weak lensing maps by the inverse-Gaussianization method

To take full advantage of the unprecedented power of upcoming weak lensing surveys, understanding the noise, such as cosmic variance and geometry/mask effects, is as important as understanding the signal itself. Accurately quantifying the noise requires a large number of statistically independent mocks for a variety of cosmologies. This is impractical for weak lensing simulations, which are costly for simultaneous requirements of large box size (to cover a significant fraction of the past light cone) and high resolution (to robustly probe the small scale where most lensing signal resides). Therefore fast mock generation methods are desired and are under intensive investigation. We propose a new fast weak lensing map generation method, named the inverse-Gaussianization method, based on the finding that a lensing convergence field can be Gaussianized to excellent accuracy by a local transformation [Yu et al, Phys. Rev. D 84, 023523 (2011)]. Given a simulation, it enables us to produce as many as infinite statistically independent lensing maps as fast as producing the simulation initial conditions. The proposed method is tested against simulations for each tomography bin centered at lens redshift $z \sim 0.5$, 1, and 2, with various statistics. We find that the lensing maps generated by our method have reasonably accurate power spectra, bispectra, and power spectrum covariance matrix. Therefore, it will be useful for weak lensing surveys to generate realistic mocks. As an example of application, we measure the probability distribution function of the lensing power spectrum, from 16384 lensing maps produced by the inverse-Gaussianization method.

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