arXiv subjects

Tzihong Chiueh

Publications and source records attributed to Tzihong Chiueh.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2009

High-Resolution Simulation on Structure Formation with Extremely Light Bosonic Dark Matter

An alternative bosonic dark matter model is examined in detail via high-resolution simulations. These bosons have particle mass of order $10^{-22}eV$ and are non-interacting. If they do exist and can account for structure formation, these bosons must be condensed into the Bose-Einstein state and described by a coherent wave function. This matter, also known as Fuzzy Dark Matter (Hu, Barkana & Gruzinov 2000),, is speculated to be able, first, to eliminate the sub-galactic halos to solve the problem of over-abundance of dwarf galaxies, and, second, to produce flat halo cores in galaxies suggested by some observations. Our simulation results show that although this extremely light bosonic dark matter indeed suppresses low-mass halos, it can, to the contrary of expectation, yield singular halo cores. The density profile of the singular halo is almost identical to the halo profile of Navarro, Frenk & White (1997). Such a profile seems to be universal, in that it can be produced via either accretion or merger.

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arXiv2009

AMiBA: System Performance

The Y.T. Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy (AMiBA) started scientific operation in early 2007. This work describes the optimization of the system performance for the measurements of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect for six massive galaxy clusters at redshifts $0.09 - 0.32$. We achieved a point source sensitivity of $63\pm 7$ mJy with the seven 0.6m dishes in 1 hour of on-source integration in 2-patch differencing observations. We measured and compensated for the delays between the antennas of our platform-mounted interferometer. Beam switching was used to cancel instrumental instabilities and ground pick up. Total power and phase stability were good on time scales of hours, and the system was shown to integrate down on equivalent timescales of 300 hours per baseline/correlation, or about 10 hours for the entire array. While the broadband correlator leads to good sensitivity, the small number of lags in the correlator resulted in poorly measured bandpass response. We corrected for this by using external calibrators (Jupiter and Saturn). Using Jupiter as the flux standard, we measured the disk brightness temperature of Saturn to be $149^{+5}_{-12}$ K.

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arXiv2009

The AMiBA Hexapod Telescope Mount

AMiBA is the largest hexapod astronomical telescope in current operation. We present a description of this novel hexapod mount with its main mechanical components -- the support cone, universal joints, jack screws, and platform -- and outline the control system with the pointing model and the operating modes that are supported. The AMiBA hexapod mount performance is verified based on optical pointing tests and platform photogrammetry measurements. The photogrammetry results show that the deformations in the inner part of the platform are less than 120 micron rms. This is negligible for optical pointing corrections, radio alignment and radio phase errors for the currently operational 7-element compact configuration. The optical pointing error in azimuth and elevation is successively reduced by a series of corrections to about 0.4 arcmin rms which meets our goal for the 7-element target specifications.

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arXiv2009

The Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy

The Yuan-Tseh Lee Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy (AMiBA) is the first interferometer dedicated to studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation at 3mm wavelength. The choice of 3mm was made to minimize the contributions from foreground synchrotron radiation and Galactic dust emission. The initial configuration of seven 0.6m telescopes mounted on a 6-m hexapod platform was dedicated in October 2006 on Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Scientific operations began with the detection of a number of clusters of galaxies via the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. We compare our data with Subaru weak lensing data in order to study the structure of dark matter. We also compare our data with X-ray data in order to derive the Hubble constant.

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arXiv2008

The Redshift Evolution of Wet, Dry, and Mixed Galaxy Mergers from Close Galaxy Pairs in the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey

We study the redshift evolution of galaxy pair fractions and merger rates for different types of galaxies using kinematic pairs selected from the DEEP2 Redshift Survey. By parameterizing the evolution of the pair fraction as (1+z)^{m}, we find that the companion rate increases mildly with redshift with m = 0.41+-0.20 for all galaxies with -21 < M_B^{e} < -19. Blue galaxies show slightly faster evolution in the blue companion rate with m = 1.27+-0.35 while red galaxies have had fewer red companions in the past as evidenced by the negative slope m = -0.92+-0.59. We find that at low redshift the pair fraction within the red sequence exceeds that of the blue cloud, indicating a higher merger probability among red galaxies compared to that among the blue galaxies. With further assumptions on the merger timescale and the fraction of pairs that will merge, the galaxy major merger rates for 0.1 < z <1.2 are estimated to be ~10^{-3}h^{3}Mpc^{-3}Gyr^{-1} with a factor of 2 uncertainty. At z ~ 1.1, 68% of mergers are wet, 8% of mergers are dry, and 24% of mergers are mixed, compared to 31% wet mergers, 25% dry mergers, and 44% mixed mergers at z ~ 0.1. The growth of dry merger rates with decreasing redshift is mainly due to the increase in the co-moving number density of red galaxies over time. About 22% to 54% of present-day L^{*} galaxies have experienced major mergers since z ~ 1.2, depending on the definition of major mergers. Moreover, 24% of the red galaxies at the present epoch have had dry mergers with luminosity ratios between 1:4 and 4:1 since z ~ 1. Our results also suggest that the wet mergers and/or mixed mergers may be partially responsible for producing red galaxies with intermediate masses while a significant portion of massive red galaxies is assembled through dry mergers at later times.

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arXiv2008

Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics (GraCCA) -- Performance Tests

In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of the GraCCA system, a Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics simulations. It consists of 16 nodes, with each node equipped with 2 modern graphic cards, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. This computing cluster provides a theoretical performance of 16.2 TFLOPS. To demonstrate its performance in astrophysics computation, we have implemented a parallel direct N-body simulation program with shared time-step algorithm in this system. Our system achieves a measured performance of 7.1 TFLOPS and a parallel efficiency of 90% for simulating a globular cluster of 1024K particles. In comparing with the GRAPE-6A cluster at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), the GraCCA system achieves a more than twice higher measured speed and an even higher performance-per-dollar ratio. Moreover, our system can handle up to 320M particles and can serve as a general-purpose computing cluster for a wide range of astrophysics problems.

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arXiv2007

AEGIS: Enhancement of Dust-enshrouded Star Formation in Close Galaxy Pairs and Merging Galaxies up to z ~ 1

Using data from the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and HST/ACS imaging in the Extended Groth Strip, we select nearly 100 interacting galaxy systems including kinematic close pairs and morphologically identified merging galaxies. Spitzer MIPS 24 micron fluxes of these systems reflect the current dusty star formation activity, and at a fixed stellar mass (M_{*}) the median infrared luminosity (L_{IR}) among merging galaxies and close pairs of blue galaxies is twice (1.9 +/- 0.4) that of control pairs drawn from isolated blue galaxies. Enhancement declines with galaxy separation, being strongest in close pairs and mergers and weaker in wide pairs compared to the control sample. At z ~ 0.9, 7.1% +/- 4.3% of massive interacting galaxies (M_{*} > 2*10^{10} M_{solar}) are found to be ULIRGs, compared to 2.6% +/- 0.7% in the control sample. The large spread of IR luminosity to stellar mass ratio among interacting galaxies suggests that this enhancement may depend on the merger stage as well as other as yet unidentified factors (e.g., galaxy structure, mass ratio, orbital characteristics, presence of AGN or bar). The contribution of interacting systems to the total IR luminosity density is moderate (<= 36 %).

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arXiv2006

How Well Can Weak Lensing Measure the Mass of Galaxy Clusters?

The technique of weak-lensing aperture mass densitometry, so called the zeta-statistic, has recently been popular in actual observations for measurement of individual cluster mass. It has however been anticipated that the line-of-sight projection by foreground and background matter can adversely affect the cluster mass determination with not only substantial error dispersion but also a sizable positive systematic bias. Additionally, the finite number of background galaxies even at a reasonable observing depth can also introduce Poisson noise to the mass estimate. In this paper, we quantitatively investigate the degree of errors separately contributed by the two sources to the mass determination of those galaxy clusters with M_{200}>10^{14}M_{\odot}. We find that the aperture mass of zeta-statistic turns out to be a mass estimator of much reduced systematic bias, due to the cancellation by the positively biased local background mass sheet. However, the error dispersion of M_{200} arising from both projection effect and Poisson noise is found to be still sizable (40%-90%), even for the shear-selected, clean sample where multiple clusters located within a suitable projected aperture are removed. We also investigate how to remedy this large-error problem in weak lensing measurements, and propose a plausible alternative mass estimator, M(<theta_{1000}), an aperture mass measured within about half the virial radius. The aperture mass M(<theta_{1000}) is free of bias and has a substantially reduced error dispersion, 39% for the worst case of high-z, low-mass clusters, that can be smaller than the error dispersion of M_{200} as much as a factor 3.

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arXiv2005

Simulation of a Combined SZE and Weak Lensing Cluster Survey for AMiBA Experiment

We present simulations of interferometric Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZE) and optical weak lenisng observations for the forthcoming AMiBA experiment, aiming at searching for high-redshift clusters of galaxies. On the basis of simulated sky maps, we have derived theoretical halo number counts and redshift distributions of selected halo samples for an AMiBA SZE survey and a weak lensing follow-up survey. By utilizing the conditional number counts of weak lensing halos with the faint SZE detection, we show that a combined SZE and weak lensing survey can gain an additional fainter halo sample at a given false positive rate, which cannot be obtained from either survey alone.

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arXiv2005

Cluster Baryon Fraction and Structure from the Convergence/SZ Effect Diagram

The cross-correlation of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZ) and weak-lensing imaging surveys can be used to test how well hot baryons trace dark matter in clusters of galaxies. We examine this concept using mock SZ and weak-lensing surveys based on the forthcoming AMiBA experiment and generated from a pre-heated cosmological N-body/hydrodynamic simulation. A cross-correlation diagram between matched lensing convergence and Compton y maps exhibits butterfly-wing-like structures, corresponding to individual clusters, that encode rich information about the distributions of hot gas and dark matter. When the cluster redshift and temperature are available the slope of a wing reveals the cluster gas fraction and the width of the wing indicates how badly the hot gas traces dark matter. On the basis of simulated data we discuss systematic errors in the projected gas fraction estimates that would be obtained from such survey comparisons.

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arXiv2002

Effects of Preheated Clusters on the CMB Spectrum

Mounting evidence from $x$-ray observations reveals that bound objects should receive some form of energy in the past injected from non-gravitaional sources. We report that an instantaneous heating scheme, for which gases in dense regions were subjected to a temperature jump of 1keV at $z=2$ whereas those in rarified regions remained intact, can produce bound objects obeying the observed mass-temperature and luminosity-temperature relations. Such preheating lowers the peak Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) power by a factor of 2 and exacerbates the need for the normalization of matter fluctuations $σ_8$ to assume an extreme high value $(\sim 1.1)$ for the SZ signals to account for the excess anisotropy on 5-arcminute scale detected by the Cosmic Background Imager in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

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arXiv2002

The Annulus-Filtered E and B Modes in CMBR Polarization

Although it has previously been recognized that the CMB polarization measurement on a sky ring is able to separate the B and E-mode patterns, we show that the rotational symmetry of the CMB polarization measurement is indeed unique, in that it enables the B and E modes to be separately measured in a simple and clean manner. The separation of B and E modes can in principle be achieved even with a single-polarization detector of arbitrary beam pattern. Based on this premise, a specific observing strategy is suggested, where the telescope scans along a sky circle with the polarimeter axis always oriented to a fixed direction with respect to the radial direction of the sky circle. The observational strategy for B-mode measurements can further be refined by choosing appropriate beam sizes to suppress the accidental E-mode leakage. We present the expected variances of the measured E and B-mode surface-brightness fluctuations as functions of the sky annulus radius and beam size. The measured peak power is expected to be up to 10% of the total power contained in the CMB polarization fluctuations for both B and E modes. The temperature-polarization, or T-E, correlation can be measured by the present method as well. By adopting this strategy, the AMiBA experiment is expected to detect, in a single sky annulus, a 1σ$ B-mode signal in 340 hours.

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arXiv2002

Future Island Universes in a Background Universe Accelerated by Cosmological Constant and by Quintessence

We study bound object formation in a background universe accelerated by cosmological constant and by quintessence. If the acceleration lasts forever, due to the existence of event horizon, one would have naively expected the universe to approach a state of cold death. However, we find that many local regions in the universe can in fact be protected by their own gravity to form mini-universes, provided that their present matter densities exceed some critical value. In the case with cosmological constant ($Λ$CDM cosmology) the condition of forming mini-universe is that the ratio of present density parameters $Ω_{i}^0/Ω_Λ$ ought to be larger than a critical value 3.63. Such mini-universes typically weigh less than $2\times 10^{14}$ solar masses, with the lighter ones having tight and compact configurations. In the case with quintessence, the final ratio $Ω_i/Ω_q$ of a mini-universe is found to be always larger than $w_q^2-w_q$, where $w_q$ is the equation of state parameter.

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arXiv2002

Incompressible Hydrodynamics on a Noncommutative D3-Brane

In the Seiberg-Witten limit, the low-energy dynamics of N weakly coupled identical open strings on a D3-brane can behave as two-dimensional incompressible hydrodynamics. Classical vortices are frozen in the fluid and described by an action expressed in terms of two canonical conjugate fields, which can be taken as the new space coordinate. The noncommutative space naturally arises when this pair of conjugate fields are quantized. To the lowest order of $\hbar$, the vorticity can replace the background $B$-field on the D3 brane, thereby yielding a spatially and temporally varying noncommutative parameter $θ^{ij}$. Demanding a quantum area-preserving transformation between two classical inertial-frame coordinates, we identify the classical solitons that survive in the noncommutative space, and they turn out to be the "electric field" solutions of the Dirac-Born-Infeld Lagrangian created by a $δ$-function source. The strongly magnetized electron gas in a semiconductor of finite thickness is taken as a case study, where similar quantum column vortices as those in a D3 brane can be present. The electric charges contained in these electron-gas column vortices are quantized, but in a way different from those in the sheet vortices that produce the fractional quantum Hall effect.

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arXiv2002

Bias and Conditional Mass Function of Dark Halos Based on the Nonspherical Collapse Model

Nonspherical collapse is modelled, under the Zeldovich approximation, by six-dimensional random walks of the initial deformation tensor field. The collapse boundary adopted here is a slightly-modified version of that proposed by Chiueh and Lee (2001). Not only the mass function agrees with the fitting formula of Sheth and Tormen (1999), but the bias function and conditional mass function constructed by this model are also found to agree reasonably well with the simulation results of Jing (1998) and Somerville et al. (2000), respectively. In particular, by introducing a small mass gap, we find a fitting formula for the conditional mass function, which works well even at small time intervals between parent and progenitor halos during the merging history.

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arXiv2002

An Analytical Approach to the Spin-Distribution of Dark Halos

We derive the distribution of the dimensionless specific angular momentum of dark matter halos, $P(j)$, in the framework of the standard tidal torque theory, and explain the characteristic shape of $P(j)$ commonly observed in N-body simulations. A scalar quantity (shear scalar), $r$, is introduced for measuring the effective strength of the tidal torque force acting upon the halo from the surrounding matter. It is found that the ubiquitous and broad shape of $P(j)$ can mostly be attributed to the unique property of the shear scalar $r$, and also that $P(j)$ is insensitve to the underlying collapse dynamics. Our result demonstrates that although the shape of $P(j)$ is ubiquitous and close to log-normal, the distribution is not exactly log-normal but decays exponentially at the high angular momentum end, and drops slowly as a power-law with an index 2 at the low angular momentum end.

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arXiv2002

Radio Confusion on Cluster Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

We examine the expected radio confusion on the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect of galaxy clusters at 28.5 GHz and 90 GHz based on the cluster radio luminosity function (CRLF) at 1.4 GHz. With the observationally determined spectral index ($α$, where $S_{\rmν}\proptoν^{-α}$) distribution, instead of a single average index $<α>$, we convert the cluster radio luminosity function at 1.4 GHz to the high frequency ones and estimate the total radio flux in a cluster. At 28.5 GHz, radio confusion is up to 10~100% for small clusters ($M\sim 2\times 10^{14}M_{\odot}$) below redshift z=1, with more severe confusion for smaller and lower redshift clusters. By contrast, at 90 GHz the confusion is less than 10% for small clusters even at low redshifts.

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arXiv2001

Dynamics of Multi-Component, Multi-Field Quintessence

Dynamics of the multi-component, multi-field quintessence and gravity is formulated as relativistic N-particle dynamics, embedded in a static viscus flat space and under the forces given by an interacting Lorentz scalar potential via exchange of field bosons. The Ratra-Peebles power-law potential of effective single-field quintessence can be derived from this microscopic perspective. In certain situations, the effective dynamics can be made identical to that of the single complex quintessence, except for that the overall U(1) symmetry is not manifestly broken. The present formulation provides a convenient gauge for analyzing the superhorizon perturbations and possibly for quantization of superhorizon fields and gravity.

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