arXiv subjects

Vincent Desjacques

Publications and source records attributed to Vincent Desjacques.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Non-perturbative halo clustering from cosmological density peaks

Associating the formation sites of haloes with the maxima of the smoothed linear density field, we present non-perturbative predictions for the Lagrangian and evolved halo correlation functions that are valid at all separations. In Lagrangian space, we find significant deviations from the perturbative bias calculation at small scales, in particular, a pronounced exclusion region where $ξ=-1$ for maxima of unequal height. Our predictions are in good agreement with the Lagrangian clustering of dark matter proto-haloes reconstructed from N-body simulations. Our predictions for the mean infall and velocity dispersion of haloes, which differ from the local bias expansion, show a similar level of agreement with simulations. Finally, we displace the initial density peaks according to the Zeldovich approximation in order to predict the late-time clustering of dark matter haloes. While we are able to reproduce the early evolution of this conserved set of tracers, our approximation fails at the collapse epoch (z=0) on non-linear scales r<10Mpc/h, emphasizing the need for a non-perturbative treatment of the halo displacement field.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Primordial Non-Gaussianity from Biased Tracers: Likelihood Analysis of Real-Space Power Spectrum and Bispectrum

Upcoming galaxy redshift surveys promise to significantly improve current limits on primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG) through measurements of 2- and 3-point correlation functions in Fourier space. However, realizing the full potential of this dataset is contingent upon having both accurate theoretical models and optimized analysis methods. Focusing on the local model of PNG, parameterized by $f_{\rm NL}$, we perform a Monte-Carlo Markov Chain analysis to confront perturbation theory predictions of the halo power spectrum and bispectrum in real space against a suite of N-body simulations. We model the halo bispectrum at tree-level, including all contributions linear and quadratic in $f_{\rm NL}$, and the halo power spectrum at 1-loop, including tree-level terms up to quadratic order in $f_{\rm NL}$ and all loops induced by local PNG linear in $f_{\rm NL}$. Keeping the cosmological parameters fixed, we examine the effect of informative priors on the linear non-Gaussian bias parameter on the statistical inference of $f_{\rm NL}$. A conservative analysisof the combined power spectrum and bispectrum, in which only loose priors are imposed and all parameters are marginalized over, can improve the constraint on $f_{\rm NL}$ by more than a factor of 5 relative to the power spectrum-only measurement. Imposing a strong prior on $b_ϕ$, or assuming bias relations for both $b_ϕ$ and $b_{ϕδ}$ (motivated by a universal mass function assumption), improves the constraints further by a factor of few. In this case, however, we find a significant systematic shift in the inferred value of $f_{\rm NL}$ if the same range of wavenumber is used. Likewise, a Poisson noise assumption can lead to significant systematics, and it is thus essential to leave all the stochastic amplitudes free.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Axion oscillations in binary systems: angle-action surgery

Scalar, tensor waves induce oscillatory perturbations in Keplerian systems that can be probed with measurements of pulsar timing residuals. In this paper, we consider the imprint of coherent oscillations produced by ultralight axion dark matter on the Roemer time delay. We use the angle-action formalism to calculate the time evolution of the observed signal and its dependence on the orbital parameters and the axion phase. We derive exact analytical expressions for arbitrary binary pulsar mass ratio and eccentricity, alleviating the need for long numerical integrations. We emphasize the similarity of the expected signal-to-noise ratio with the response of a harmonic oscillator to an external oscillatory driving. We validate our theoretical predictions with numerical simulations. Our results furnish a useful benchmark for numerical codes and analysis procedures and, hopefully, will motivate the search for such imprints in real data.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

The Probability Distribution of Astrophysical Gravitational-Wave Background Fluctuations

The coalescence of compact binary stars is expected to produce a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) observable with future GW detectors. Such backgrounds are usually characterized by their power spectrum as a function of frequency. Here, we present a method to calculate the full 1-point distribution of strain fluctuations. We focus on time series data, but our approach generalizes to the frequency domain. We illustrate how this probability distribution can be evaluated numerically. In addition, we derive accurate analytical asymptotic expressions for the large strain tail, which demonstrate that it is dominated by the nearest source. As an application, we calculate the distribution of strain fluctuations for the astrophysical GW background produced by binary mergers of compact stars in the Universe, and the distribution of the observed confusion background obtained upon subtracting bright, resolved sources from the signal. We quantify the extent to which they deviate from a Gaussian distribution. Our approach could be useful for the spectral shape reconstruction of stochastic GW backgrounds.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Shot noise in multi-tracer constraints on $f_\text{NL}$ and relativistic projections: Power Spectrum

Multiple tracers of the same surveyed volume can enhance the signal-to-noise on a measurement of local primordial non-Gaussianity and the relativistic projections. Increasing the number of tracers comparably increases the number of shot noise terms required to describe the stochasticity of the data. Although the shot noise is white on large scales, it is desirable to investigate the extent to which it can degrade constraints on the parameters of interest. In a multi-tracer analysis of the power spectrum, a marginalization over shot noise does not degrade the constraints on $f_\text{NL}$ by more than $\sim 30$% so long as halos of mass $M\lesssim 10^{12}M_\odot$ are resolved. However, ignoring cross shot noise terms induces large systematics on a measurement of $f_\text{NL}$ at redshift $z<1$ when small mass halos are resolved. These effects are less severe for the relativistic projections, especially for the dipole term. In the case of a low and high mass tracer, the optimal sample division maximizes the signal-to-noise on $f_\text{NL}$ and the projection effects simultaneously, reducing the errors to the level of $\sim 10$ consecutive mass bins of equal number density. We also emphasize that the non-Poissonian noise corrections that arise from small-scale clustering effects cannot be measured with random dilutions of the data. Therefore, they must either be properly modeled or marginalized over.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Axion core - halo mass and the black hole - halo mass relation: constraints on a few parsec scales

If the dark matter is made of ultra-light axions, stable solitonic cores form at the centers of virialized halos. In some range for the mass $m$ of the axion particle, these cores are sufficiently compact and can mimic supermassive black holes (SMBH) residing at galactic nuclei. We use the solitonic core--halo mass relation, validated in numerical simulations, to constrain a new range of allowed axion mass from measurements of the SMBH mass in (pseudo)bulge and bulgeless galaxies. These limits are based on observations of galactic nuclei on scales smaller than 10 pc. Our analysis suggests that $m < 10^{-18}$ eV is ruled out by the data. We briefly discuss whether an attractive self-interaction among axions could alleviate this constraint.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Axion resonances in binary pulsar systems

We investigate the extent to which resonances between an oscillating background of ultra-light axion and a binary Keplerian system can affect the motion of the latter. These resonances lead to perturbations in the instantaneous time-of-arrivals, and to secular variations in the period of the binary. While the secular changes at exact resonance have recently been explored, the instantaneous effects have been overlooked. In this paper, we examine the latter using N-body simulations including the external oscillatory forcing induced by the axion background. While the secular effects are restricted to a narrow width near the resonance, the instantaneous changes, albeit strongest close to resonances, are apparent for wide range of configurations. We compute the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as a function of semi-major axis for a detection of axion oscillations through the R\{o} mer delay. The latter can be extracted from the time-of-arrivals of binary pulsars. The SNR broadly increases with increasing binary eccentricity in agreement with the secular expectation. However, we find that it differs significantly from the scaling a^{5/2} around the lowest orders of resonance. Future observations could probe these effects away from resonances and, therefore, constrain a much broader range of axion masses provided that binary pulsar systems are found near the central region of our Galaxy, and that the time-or-arrival measurement accuracy reaches < 10 ns

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

Gravitational waves from in-spirals of compact objects in binary common-envelope evolution

Detection of gravitational-wave (GW) sources enables the characterisation of binary compact objects and of their in-spiral. However, other dissipative processes can affect the in-spiral. Here we show that the in-spiral of compact objects through a gaseous common-envelope (CE) arising from an evolved stellar companion produces a novel type of GW-sources, whose evolution is dominated by the dissipative gas dynamical friction effects from the CE, rather than the GW-emission itself. The evolution and properties of the GW-signals differ from those of isolated gas-poor mergers significantly. We find characteristic strains of $\sim10^{-23}$-$10^{-21}$ ($10{\rm kpc}/{D}$) for such sources -- observable by next-generation space-based GW-detectors. The evolution of the GW-signal can serve as a probe of the interior regions of the evolved star, and the final stages of CE-evolution, otherwise inaccessible through other observational means. Moreover, such CE-mergers are frequently followed by observable explosive electromagnetic counterparts and/or the formation of exotic stars.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

The information content of Cosmic Infrared Background anisotropies

We use analytic computations to predict the power spectrum as well as the bispectrum of Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) anisotropies. Our approach is based on the halo model and takes into account the mean luminosity-mass relation. The model is used to forecast the possibility to simultaneously constrain cosmological, CIB and halo occupation distribution (HOD) parameters in the presence of foregrounds. For the analysis we use wavelengths in eight frequency channels between 200 and 900$\;\mathrm{GHz}$ with survey specifications given by Planck and LiteBird. We explore the sensitivity to the model parameters up to multipoles of $\ell =1000$ using auto- and cross-correlations between the different frequency bands. With this setting, cosmological, HOD and CIB parameters can be constrained to a few percent. Galactic dust is modeled by a power law and the shot noise contribution as a frequency dependent amplitude which are marginalized over. We find that dust residuals in the CIB maps only marginally influence constraints on standard cosmological parameters. Furthermore, the bispectrum yields tighter constraints (by a factor four in $1σ$ errors) on almost all model parameters while the degeneracy directions are very similar to the ones of the power spectrum. The increase in sensitivity is most pronounced for the sum of the neutrino masses. Due to the similarity of degeneracies a combination of both analysis is not needed for most parameters. This, however, might be due to the simplified bias description generally adopted in such halo model approaches.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

The Spatial Clustering of Primordial Black Holes

The possibility that primordial black holes (PBHs) are the dark matter (or a fraction thereof) has attracted much attention recently. Their spatial clustering is a fundamental property which determines, among others, whether current observational constraints are evaded within a given mass range, whether merging is significant and whether primordial black holes could generate cosmological structure. We treat them as discrete objects and clarify the issue of their spatial clustering, with an emphasis on short-range exclusion and its impact on their large scale power spectrum. Even if a Poissonian self-pair term is always present in the zero-lag correlation, this does not necessarily imply that primordial black holes are initially Poisson distributed. However, while the initial PBH clustering depends on the detailed shape of the small-scale power spectrum, we argue that it is not relevant for a narrow spectral feature and primordial black hole masses still allowed by observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

Large-Scale Galaxy Bias

This review presents a comprehensive overview of galaxy bias, that is, the statistical relation between the distribution of galaxies and matter. We focus on large scales where cosmic density fields are quasi-linear. On these scales, the clustering of galaxies can be described by a perturbative bias expansion, and the complicated physics of galaxy formation is absorbed by a finite set of coefficients of the expansion, called bias parameters. The review begins with a detailed derivation of this very important result, which forms the basis of the rigorous perturbative description of galaxy clustering, under the assumptions of General Relativity and Gaussian, adiabatic initial conditions. Key components of the bias expansion are all leading local gravitational observables, which include the matter density but also tidal fields and their time derivatives. We hence expand the definition of local bias to encompass all these contributions. This derivation is followed by a presentation of the peak-background split in its general form, which elucidates the physical meaning of the bias parameters, and a detailed description of the connection between bias parameters and galaxy statistics. We then review the excursion-set formalism and peak theory which provide predictions for the values of the bias parameters. In the remainder of the review, we consider the generalizations of galaxy bias required in the presence of various types of cosmological physics that go beyond pressureless matter with adiabatic, Gaussian initial conditions: primordial non-Gaussianity, massive neutrinos, baryon-CDM isocurvature perturbations, dark energy, and modified gravity. Finally, we discuss how the description of galaxy bias in the galaxies' rest frame is related to clustering statistics measured from the observed angular positions and redshifts in actual galaxy catalogs.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2019

The Galaxy Power Spectrum and Bispectrum in Redshift Space

We present the complete expression for the next-to-leading (1-loop) order galaxy power spectrum and the leading-order galaxy bispectrum in redshift space in the general bias expansion, or equivalently the effective field theory of biased tracers. We consistently include all line-of-sight dependent selection effects. These are degenerate with many, but not all, of the redshift-space distortion contributions, and have not been consistently derived before. Moreover, we show that, in the framework of effective field theory, a consistent bias expansion in redshift space must include these selection contributions. Physical arguments about the tracer sample considered and its observational selection have to be used to justify neglecting the selection contributions. In summary, the next-to-leading order galaxy power spectrum and leading-order galaxy bispectrum in the general bias expansion are described by 22 parameters, which reduces to 11 parameters if selection effects can be neglected. All contributions to the power spectrum can be written in terms of 28 independent loop integrals.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Backreaction of axion coherent oscillations

We investigate how coherent oscillations backreact on the evolution of the condensate wave function of ultra-light axions in the non-relativistic regime appropriate to cosmic structure formation. The coherent oscillations induce higher harmonics beyond the fundamental mode considered so far when a self-interaction is present, and imprint oscillations in the gravitational potential. We emphasize that the effective self-interaction felt by the slowly-varying envelop of the wave function always differs from the bare Lagrangian interaction potential. We also point out that, in the hydrodynamical formulation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, oscillations in the gravitational potential result in an attractive force that counteracts the effect of the quantum pressure arising from the strong delocalization of the particles. Since these effects become significant on physical scales less than the (large) Compton wavelength of the particle, they are presumably not very relevant on the mildly nonlinear scales traced by intergalactic neutral hydrogen for axion masses consistent with the bounds from the Lyman-$α$ forest. However, they might affect the formation of virialized cosmological structures and their stability.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Abundance of peaks and dips in three-dimensional mass and halo density fields: a test for cosmology

Using cosmological N-body simulations, we study the abundance of local maxima (peaks) and minima (dips) identified in the smoothed distribution of halos and dark matter (DM) on scales of $10-100$s Mpcs. The simulations include Gaussian and local-type $f_{\rm NL}$ non-Gaussian initial conditions. The expression derived in the literature for the abundance (irrespective of height) of peaks for Gaussian fields is surprisingly accurate for the evolved halo and DM density fields for all initial conditions considered. Furthermore, the height distribution is very well fitted by a log-normal on quasi-linear scales. The abundance as a function of scale depends on the cosmological parameters ($H_0$ and background matter densities) through the shape of the power spectrum, but it is insensitive to the clustering amplitude. Further, the abundance in the smoothed halo distribution is substantially different in the non-Gaussian from the Gaussian simulations. The interpretation of this effect is straightforward in terms of the scale dependence of halo bias in non-Gaussian models. The abundance of extrema extracted from three-dimensional large galaxy redshift surveys could be a competitive probe of the cosmological parameters and initial non-Gaussianity. It breaks the degeneracy between $f_{\rm NL}$ and the clustering amplitude, making it complementary to counts of galaxy clusters and peaks in weak-lensing maps.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

The impact of ultra-light axion self-interactions on the large scale structure of the Universe

Ultra-light axions have sparked attention because their tiny mass $m\sim 10^{-22}$ eV, which leads to a Kiloparsec-scale de Broglie wavelength comparable to the size of dwarf galaxy, could alleviate the so-called small-scale crisis of massive cold dark matter (CDM) candidates.However, recent analyses of the Lyman-$α$ forest power spectrum set a tight lower bound on their mass of $m\gtrsim 10^{-21}$ eV which makes them much less relevant from an astrophysical point of view. An important caveat to these numerical studies is that they do not take into account attractive self-interactions among ultra-light axions, which can counteract the quantum "pressure" induced by the strong delocalization of the particles. In this work, we show that even a tiny attractive interaction among ultra-light axions can have a significant impact on the stability of cosmic structures at low redshift. After a brief review of known results about solitons in the absence of gravity, we discuss the stability of filamentary and pancake-like solutions when quantum pressure, attractive interactions and gravity are present. The analysis based on one degree of freedom, namely the breathing mode, reveals that pancakes are stable, while filaments are unstable if the mass per unit length is larger than a critical value. However, we show that pancakes are unstable against transverse perturbations. We expect this to be true for halos and filaments as well. Instabilities driven by the breathing mode will not be seen in the low column density Lyman-$α$ forest unless the axion decay constant is extremely small, $f\lesssim 10^{13}$ GeV. Notwithstanding, axion solitonic cores could leave a detectable signature in the Lyman-$α$ forest if the normalization of the unknown axion core - filament mass relation is $\sim 100$ larger than it is for spherical halos.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Shot noise and biased tracers: a new look at the halo model

Shot noise is an important ingredient to any measurement or theoretical modeling of discrete tracers of the large scale structure. Recent work has shown that the shot noise in the halo power spectrum becomes increasingly sub-Poissonian at high mass. Interestingly, while the halo model predicts a shot noise power spectrum in qualitative agreement with the data, it leads to an unphysical white noise in the cross halo-matter and matter power spectrum. In this work, we show that absorbing all the halo model sources of shot noise into the halo fluctuation field leads to meaningful predictions for the shot noise contributions to halo clustering statistics and remove the unphysical white noise from the cross halo-matter statistics. Our prescription straightforwardly maps onto the general bias expansion, so that the renormalized shot noise terms can be expressed as combinations of the halo model shot noises. Furthermore, we demonstrate that non-Poissonian contributions are related to volume integrals over correlation functions and their response to long-wavelength density perturbations. This leads to a new class of consistency relations for discrete tracers, which appear to be satisfied by our reformulation of the halo model. We test our theoretical predictions against measurements of halo shot noise bispectra extracted from a large suite of numerical simulations. Our model reproduces qualitatively the observed sub-Poissonian noise, although it underestimates the magnitude of this effect.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Tidal shear and the consistency of microscopic Lagrangian halo approaches

We delineate the conditions under which the consistency relation for the non-Gaussian bias and the universality of the halo mass function hold in the context of microscopic Lagrangian descriptions of halos. The former is valid provided that the collapse barrier depends only on the physical fields (instead of fields normalized by their variance for example) and explicitly includes the effect of {\it all} physical fields such as the tidal shear. The latter holds provided that the response of the halo number density to a long-wavelength density fluctuation is equivalent to the response induced by shifting the spherical collapse threshold. Our results apply to any Lagrangian halo bias prescription. Effective "moving" barriers, which are ubiquitous in the literature, do not generally satisfy the consistency relation. Microscopic barriers including the tidal shear lead to two additional, second-order Lagrangian bias parameters which ensure that the consistency relation is satisfied. We provide analytic expressions for them.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Verifying the consistency relation for the scale-dependent bias from local primordial non-Gaussianity

We measure the large-scale bias of dark matter halos in simulations with non-Gaussian initial conditions of the local type, and compare this bias to the response of the mass function to a change in the primordial amplitude of fluctuations. The two are found to be consistent, as expected from physical arguments, for three halo-finder algorithms which use different Spherical Overdensity (SO) and Friends-of-Friends (FoF) methods. On the other hand, we find that the commonly used prediction for universal mass functions, that the scale-dependent bias is proportional to the first-order Gaussian Lagrangian bias, does not yield a good agreement with the measurements. For all halo finders, high-mass halos show a non-Gaussian bias suppressed by 10-15% relative to the universal mass function prediction. For SO halos, this deviation changes sign at low masses, where the non-Gaussian bias becomes larger than the universal prediction.

astro-ph.CO↗