arXiv subjects

Ue-Li Pen

Publications and source records attributed to Ue-Li Pen.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Nonlinear reconstruction

We present a direct approach to nonparametrically reconstruct the linear density field from an observed nonlinear map. We solve for the unique displacement potential consistent with the nonlinear density and positive definite coordinate transformation using a multigrid algorithm. We show that we recover the linear initial conditions up to the nonlinear scale ($r_{δ_rδ_L}>0.5$ for $k\lesssim1\ h/\mathrm{Mpc}$) with minimal computational cost. This reconstruction approach generalizes the linear displacement theory to fully nonlinear fields, potentially substantially expanding the baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift space distortions information content of dense large scale structure surveys, including for example SDSS main sample and 21cm intensity mapping initiatives.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Improved Pulsar Timing via Principle Component Mode Tracking

We present a principal component analysis method which tracks and compensates for short-timescale variability in pulsar profiles, with a goal of improving pulsar timing precision. We couple this with a fast likelihood technique for determining pulse time of arrival, marginalizing over the principal component amplitudes. This allows accurate estimation of timing errors in the presence of pulsar variability. We apply the algorithm to the slow pulsar PSR J2139+0040 using an archived set of untargeted raster-scan observations at arbitrary epochs across four years, obtaining an improved timing solution. The method permits accurate pulsar timing in data sets with short contiguous on-source observations, opening opportunities for commensality between pulsar timing and mapping surveys.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

Large magnetic field variations towards the Galactic Centre magnetar, PSR J1745-2900

Polarised radio emission from PSR J1745-2900 has already been used to investigate the strength of the magnetic field in the Galactic Centre, close to Sagittarius A*. Here we report how persistent radio emission from this magnetar, for over four years since its discovery, has revealed large changes in the observed Faraday rotation measure, by up to 3500 rad m$^{-2}$ (a five per cent fractional change). From simultaneous analysis of the dispersion measure, we determine that these fluctuations are dominated by variations in the projected magnetic field, rather than the integrated free electron density, along the changing line of sight to the rapidly moving magnetar. From a structure function analysis of rotation measure variations, and a recent epoch of rapid change of rotation measure, we determine a minimum scale of magnetic fluctuations of size ~ 2 au at the Galactic Centre distance, inferring PSR J1745-2900 is just ~ 0.1 pc behind an additional scattering screen.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Halo nonlinear reconstruction

We apply the nonlinear reconstruction method to simulated halo fields. For halo number density $2.77\times 10^{-2}$ $(h^{-1} {\rm Mpc})^{-3}$ at $z=0$, corresponding to the SDSS main sample density, we find the scale where the noise saturates the linear signal is improved to $k\gtrsim0.36\ h {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, a factor of $2.29$ improvement in scale, or $12$ in number of linear modes. The improvement is less for higher redshift or lower halo density. We expect this to substantially improve the BAO accuracy of dense, low redshift surveys, including the SDSS main sample, 6dFGS and 21cm intensity mapping initiatives.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Memory effect from supernova neutrino shells

When a supernova explodes, most of its energy is released in a shell of relativistic neutirnos which changes the surrounding geometry. We calculate the potentially observable responses to such a change in both pulsar scintillation and conventional interferometers. In both cases, the responses are permanent changes due to such a transient event. This is by-definition a memory effect. In addition to the transverse component in the usual gravitational memory (Christodolou effect) effect, it also has a longitudinal component. Furthermore it is different from the Christodolou effect as the transverse component of this memory effect also has a term that grows with time.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

An efficient method for removing point sources from full-sky radio interferometric maps

A new generation of wide-field radio interferometers designed for 21-cm surveys is being built as drift scan instruments allowing them to observe large fractions of the sky. With large numbers of antennas and frequency channels the enormous instantaneous data rates of these telescopes require novel, efficient, data management and analysis techniques. The $m$-mode formalism exploits the periodicity of such data with the sidereal day, combined with the assumption of statistical isotropy of the sky, to achieve large computational savings and render optimal analysis methods computationally tractable. We present an extension to that work that allows us to adopt a more realistic sky model and treat objects such as bright point sources. We develop a linear procedure for deconvolving maps, using a Wiener filter reconstruction technique, which simultaneously allows filtering of these unwanted components. We construct an algorithm, based on the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury formula, to efficiently invert the data covariance matrix, as required for any optimal signal-to-noise weighting. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated using simulations of a cylindrical transit telescope.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

Cosmological neutrino simulations at extreme scale

Constraining neutrino mass remains an elusive challenge in modern physics. Precision measurements are expected from several upcoming cosmological probes of large-scale structure. Achieving this goal relies on an equal level of precision from theoretical predictions of neutrino clustering. Numerical simulations of the non-linear evolution of cold dark matter and neutrinos play a pivotal role in this process. We incorporate neutrinos into the cosmological N-body code CUBEP3M and discuss the challenges associated with pushing to the extreme scales demanded by the neutrino problem. We highlight code optimizations made to exploit modern high performance computing architectures and present a novel method of data compression that reduces the phase-space particle footprint from 24 bytes in single precision to roughly 9 bytes. We scale the neutrino problem to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer and provide details of our production run, named TianNu, which uses 86% of the machine (13,824 compute nodes). With a total of 2.97 trillion particles, TianNu is currently the world's largest cosmological N-body simulation and improves upon previous neutrino simulations by two orders of magnitude in scale. We finish with a discussion of the unanticipated computational challenges that were encountered during the TianNu runtime.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Two- and Three-Dimensional Probes of Parity in Primordial Gravity Waves

We show that three-dimensional information is critical to discerning the effects of parity violation in the primordial gravity-wave background. If present, helical gravity waves induce parity-violating correlations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) between parity-odd polarization $B$-modes and parity-even temperature anisotropies ($T$) or polarization $E$-modes. Unfortunately, $EB$ correlations are much weaker than would be naively expected, which we show is due to an approximate symmetry resulting from the two-dimensional nature of the CMB. The detectability of parity-violating correlations is exacerbated by the fact that the handedness of individual modes cannot be discerned in the two-dimensional CMB, leading to a noise contribution from scalar matter perturbations. In contrast, the tidal imprints of primordial gravity waves fossilized into the large-scale structure of the Universe are a three-dimensional probe of parity violation. Using such fossils the handedness of gravity waves may be determined on a mode-by-mode basis, permitting future surveys to probe helicity at the percent level if the amplitude of primordial gravity waves is near current observational upper limits.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Isobaric Reconstruction of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation

In this paper, we report a significant recovery of the linear baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) signature by applying the isobaric reconstruction algorithm to the non-linear matter density field. Assuming only the longitudinal component of the displacement being cosmologically relevant, this algorithm iteratively solves the coordinate transform between the Lagrangian and Eulerian frames without requiring any specific knowledge of the dynamics. For dark matter field, it produces the non-linear displacement potential with very high fidelity. The reconstruction error at the pixel level is within a few percent, and is caused only by the emergence of the transverse component after the shell-crossing. As it circumvents the strongest non-linearity of the density evolution, the reconstructed field is well-described by linear theory and immune from the bulk-flow smearing of the BAO signature. Therefore this algorithm could significantly improve the measurement accuracy of the sound horizon scale. For a perfect large-scale structure survey at redshift zero without Poisson or instrumental noise, the fractional error is reduced by a factor of 2.7, very close to the ideal limit with linear power spectrum and Gaussian covariance matrix.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Testing Gravity with Pulsar Scintillation Measurements

We propose to use pulsar scintillation measurements to test predictions of alternative theories of gravity. Comparing to single-path pulsar timing measurements, the scintillation measurements can achieve a factor of 10^5 improvement in timing accuracy, due to the effect of multi-path interference. Previous scintillation measurements of PSR B0834+06 have data acquisition for hours, making this approach sensitive to mHz gravitational waves. Therefore it has unique advantages in measuring gravitational effect or other mechanisms (at mHz and above frequencies) on light propagation. We illustrate its application in constraining scalar gravitational-wave background, in which case the sensitivities can be greatly improved with respect to previous limits. We expect much broader applications in testing gravity with existing and future pulsar scintillation observations.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

Limits on the ultra-bright Fast Radio Burst population from the CHIME Pathfinder

We present results from a new incoherent-beam Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search on the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder. Its large instantaneous field of view (FoV) and relative thermal insensitivity allow us to probe the ultra-bright tail of the FRB distribution, and to test a recent claim that this distribution's slope, $α\equiv-\frac{\partial \log N}{\partial \log S}$, is quite small. A 256-input incoherent beamformer was deployed on the CHIME Pathfinder for this purpose. If the FRB distribution were described by a single power-law with $α=0.7$, we would expect an FRB detection every few days, making this the fastest survey on sky at present. We collected 1268 hours of data, amounting to one of the largest exposures of any FRB survey, with over 2.4\,$\times$\,10$^5$\,deg$^2$\,hrs. Having seen no bursts, we have constrained the rate of extremely bright events to $<\!13$\,sky$^{-1}$\,day$^{-1}$ above $\sim$\,220$\sqrt{(τ/\rm ms)}$ Jy\,ms for $τ$ between 1.3 and 100\,ms, at 400--800\,MHz. The non-detection also allows us to rule out $α\lesssim0.9$ with 95$\%$ confidence, after marginalizing over uncertainties in the GBT rate at 700--900\,MHz, though we show that for a cosmological population and a large dynamic range in flux density, $α$ is brightness-dependent. Since FRBs now extend to large enough distances that non-Euclidean effects are significant, there is still expected to be a dearth of faint events and relative excess of bright events. Nevertheless we have constrained the allowed number of ultra-intense FRBs. While this does not have significant implications for deeper, large-FoV surveys like full CHIME and APERTIF, it does have important consequences for other wide-field, small dish experiments.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Blind Search for 21-cm Absorption Systems in New Generation Chinese Radio Telescopes

Neutral hydrogen clouds are known to exist in the Universe, however their spatial distributions and physical properties are poorly understood. Such missing information can be studied by the new generation Chinese radio telescopes through a blind searching of 21-cm absorption systems. We forecast the capabilities of surveys of 21-cm absorption systems by two representative radio telescopes in China -- Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and Tianlai 21-cm cosmology experiment (Tianlai). Facilitated by either the high sensitivity (FAST) or the wide field of view (Tianlai) of these telescopes, more than a thousand 21-cm absorption systems can be discovered in a few years, representing orders of magnitude improvement over the cumulative discoveries in the past half a century.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2017

Descattering of Giant Pulses in PSR B1957+20

The interstellar medium scatters radio waves which causes pulsars to scintillate. For intrinsically short bursts of emission, the observed signal should be a direct measurement of the impulse response function. We show that this is indeed the case for giant pulses from PSR B1957+20: from baseband observations at 327 MHz, we demonstrate that the observed voltages of a bright pulse allow one to coherently descatter nearby ones. We find that while the scattering timescale is $12.3\,μ$s, the power in the descattered pulses is concentrated within a span almost two orders of magnitude shorter, of $\lesssim\!200\,$ns. This sets an upper limit to the intrinsic duration of the giant pulses. We verify that the response inferred from the giant pulses is consistent with the scintillation pattern obtained by folding the regular pulsed emission, and that it decorrelates on the same timescale, of~$84\,$s. In principle, with large sets of giant pulses, it should be possible to constrain the structure of the scattering screen much more directly than with other current techniques, such as holography on the dynamic spectrum and cyclic spectroscopy.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Nonlinear $E$-mode clustering in Lagrangian space

We study the nonlinear $E$-mode clustering in Lagrangian space by using large scale structure $N$-body simulations and use the displacement field information in Lagrangian space to recover the primordial linear density field. We find that, compared to Eulerian nonlinear density fields, the $E$-mode displacement fields in Lagrangian space improves the cross-correlation scale $k$ with initial density field by a factor of 6-7, containing two orders of magnitude more primordial information. This illustrates ability of potential density reconstruction algorithms, to improve the baryonic acoustic oscillation measurements from current and future large scale structure surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Gravitational rotation of polarization: Clarifying the gauge dependence and prediction for double pulsar

From the basic concepts of general relativity, we investigate the rotation of the polarization angle by a moving gravitational lens. Particularly, we clarify the existing confusion in the literature by showing and explaining why such rotation must explicitly depend on the relative motion between the observer and the lens. We update the prediction of such effect on the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039 and estimate a rotation angle of $\sim 10^{-7}rad$. Despite its tiny signal, this is $10$ orders of magnitude larger than the previous prediction by Ruggiero and Tartaglia, which apparently was misguided by the confusion in the literature.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

A self-consistency check for unitary propagation of Hawking quanta

The black hole information paradox presumes that quantum field theory in curved spacetime can provide unitary propagation from a near-horizon mode to an asymptotic Hawking quantum. Instead of invoking conjectural quantum gravity effects to modify such an assumption, we propose a self-consistency check. We establish an analogy to Feynman's analysis of a double-slit experiment. Feynman showed that unitary propagation of the interfering particles, namely ignoring the entanglement with the double-slit, becomes an arbitrarily reliable assumption when the screen upon which the interference pattern is projected is infinitely far away. We argue for an analogous self-consistency check for quantum field theory in curved spacetime. We apply it to the propagation of Hawking quanta and test whether ignoring the entanglement with the geometry also becomes arbitrarily reliable in the limit of a large black hole. We present curious results to suggest a negative answer, and we discuss how this loss of naive unitarity in QFT might be related to a solution of the paradox based on the soft-hair-memory effect.

hep-th↗

arXiv2016

Increasing Fisher Information by Moving-Mesh Reconstruction

Reconstruction techniques are commonly used in cosmology to reduce complicated nonlinear behaviours to a more tractable linearized system. We study a new reconstruction technique that uses the Moving-Mesh algorithm to estimate the displacement field from nonlinear matter distribution. We show the performance of this new technique by quantifying its ability to reconstruct linear modes. We study the cumulative Fisher information $I(<k_n)$ about the initial matter power spectrum in the matter power spectra in 130 $N$-body simulations before and after reconstruction, and find that the nonlinear plateau of $I(<k_n)$ is increased by a factor of $\sim 50$ after reconstruction, from $I \simeq 2.5 \times 10^{-5} /({\rm Mpc}/h)^3$ to $I \simeq 1.3 \times 10^{-3}/({\rm Mpc}/h)^3$ at large $k$. This result includes the decorrelation between initial and final fields, which has been neglected in some previous studies. We expect this technique to be beneficial to problems such as baryonic acoustic oscillations, redshift space distortions and cosmic neutrinos that rely on accurately disentangling nonlinear evolution from underlying linear effects.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Measurement of the Cold Dark Matter-Neutrino Dipole in the TianNu Simulation

Measurements of neutrino mass in cosmological observations rely on two point statistics that are hindered by significant degeneracies with the optical depth and galaxy bias. The relative velocity effect between cold dark matter and neutrinos induces a large scale dipole into the matter density field and may be able to provide orthogonal constraints to standard techniques. We numerically investigate this dipole in the TianNu Simulation, which contains cold dark matter and 50 meV neutrinos. We first compute the dipole using a new linear response technique where we treat the displacement caused by the relative velocity as a phase in Fourier space and then integrate the matter power spectrum over redshift. Then, we compute the dipole numerically in real space using the simulation density and velocity fields. We find excellent agreement between the linear response and N-body methods. Utilizing the dipole as an observational tool will require two tracers of the matter distribution that are differently biased with respect to the neutrino density.

astro-ph.CO↗