arXiv subjects

Pip Petersen

Publications and source records attributed to Pip Petersen.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Radio Recombination Line Contamination in Post-Reionization 21 cm Intensity Mapping

We explore radio recombination line (RRL) contamination in post-reionization 21 cm intensity mapping observations. We develop a formalism to estimate the contamination of the 21 cm auto-power spectrum from the myriad of RRL lines that redshift into a 21 cm map and predict contamination of the 21 cm power spectrum at all redshifts. At $z\lesssim 2$, extrapolation of the conservative upper-bound model of Petrovic & Oh (2011) predicts high contamination to the 21 cm power spectrum, whereas our empirically-calibrated models suggest contamination several orders of magnitude smaller. We also estimate the contribution from carbon RRLs and find it to be subdominant. We find the RRL contamination is highly oscillatory in wavenumber, owing to the dominant contamination from RRLs emitted close in physical space to the 21 cm emission. These oscillations could in principle bias distance measurements derived from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO), a key science driver of post-reionization 21 cm intensity mapping. We find the shift in the BAO extrema is at least two orders of magnitude smaller than relevant for percent-precision cosmology from BAO.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Cosmic topology. Part IIa. Eigenmodes, correlation matrices, and detectability of orientable Euclidean manifolds

If the Universe has non-trivial spatial topology, observables depend on both the parameters of the spatial manifold and the position and orientation of the observer. In infinite Euclidean space, most cosmological observables arise from the amplitudes of Fourier modes of primordial scalar curvature perturbations. Topological boundary conditions replace the full set of Fourier modes with specific linear combinations of selected Fourier modes as the eigenmodes of the scalar Laplacian. We present formulas for eigenmodes in orientable Euclidean manifolds with the topologies $E_{1}-E_{6}$, $E_{11}$, $E_{12}$, $E_{16}$, and $E_{18}$ that encompass the full range of manifold parameters and observer positions, generalizing previous treatments. Under the assumption that the amplitudes of primordial scalar curvature eigenmodes are independent random variables, for each topology we obtain the correlation matrices of Fourier-mode amplitudes (of scalar fields linearly related to the scalar curvature) and the correlation matrices of spherical-harmonic coefficients of such fields sampled on a sphere, such as the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We evaluate the detectability of these correlations given the cosmic variance of the observed CMB sky. We find that topologies where the distance to our nearest clone is less than about 1.2 times the diameter of the last scattering surface of the CMB give a correlation signal that is larger than cosmic variance noise in the CMB. This implies that if cosmic topology is the explanation of large-angle anomalies in the CMB, then the distance to our nearest clone is not much larger than the diameter of the last scattering surface. We argue that the topological information is likely to be better preserved in three-dimensional data, such as will eventually be available from large-scale structure surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Promise of Future Searches for Cosmic Topology

The shortest distance around the Universe through us is unlikely to be much larger than the horizon diameter if microwave background anomalies are due to cosmic topology. We show that observational constraints from the lack of matched temperature circles in the microwave background leave many possibilities for such topologies. We evaluate the detectability of microwave background multipole correlations for sample cases. Searches for topology signatures in observational data over the large space of possible topologies pose a formidable computational challenge.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Cosmic topology. Part I. Limits on orientable Euclidean manifolds from circle searches

The Einstein field equations of general relativity constrain the local curvature at every point in spacetime, but say nothing about the global topology of the Universe. Cosmic microwave background anisotropies have proven to be the most powerful probe of non-trivial topology since, within $\Lambda$CDM, these anisotropies have well-characterized statistical properties, the signal is principally from a thin spherical shell centered on the observer (the last scattering surface), and space-based observations nearly cover the full sky. The most generic signature of cosmic topology in the microwave background is pairs of circles with matching temperature and polarization patterns. No such circle pairs have been seen above noise in the WMAP or Planck temperature data, implying that the shortest non-contractible loop around the Universe through our location is longer than 98.5% of the comoving diameter of the last scattering surface. We translate this generic constraint into limits on the parameters that characterize manifolds with each of the nine possible non-trivial orientable Euclidean topologies, and provide a code which computes these constraints. In all but the simplest cases, the shortest non-contractible loop in the space can avoid us, and be shorter than the diameter of the last scattering surface by a factor ranging from 2 to at least 6. This result implies that a broader range of manifolds is observationally allowed than widely appreciated. Probing these manifolds will require more subtle statistical signatures than matched circles, such as off-diagonal correlations of harmonic coefficients.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Tunneling dynamics of an oscillating universe model

Quasiclassical methods for non-adiabatic quantum dynamics can reveal new features of quantum effects, such as tunneling evolution, that are harder to reveal in standard treatments based on wave functions of stationary states. Here, these methods are applied to an oscillating universe model introduced recently. Our quasiclassical treatment correctly describes several expected features of tunneling states, in particular just before and after tunneling into a trapped region where a model universe may oscillate through many cycles of collapse and expansion. As a new result, the oscillating dynamics is found to be much less regular than in the classical description, revealing a succession of cycles with varying maximal volume even when the matter ingredients and their parameters do not change.

gr-qc↗