Join us this week for Cosmolunch! We will have a special guest speaker, Johannes Lange from UC Santa Cruz presenting his work on Aniostrophic clustering, and then a second presentation from Heyang Long on his paper, “Inferring the properties of the sources of reionization using themorphological spectra of the ionized regions.”
Speaker: Johannes Lange (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: An All-Scale Cosmological Analysis of Anisotropic Clustering in BOSS LOWZ
Abstract: I will present new constraints on the growth rate parameter sigma_8 from modeling the anisotropic clustering in BOSS LOWZ. Compared to previous analyses, we extend the modeling into the highly non-linear regime down to scales s ~ 0.5 Mpc/h. Extracting cosmological information from non-linear scales is made possible via a sophisticated, simulation-based modeling approach. We directly compare observational data against dark matter-only simulations populated via a Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) framework. I will discuss the HOD model used, including the effects of observational incompleteness, galaxy assembly bias and galaxy velocity bias. I will also discuss tests on mock catalogs to ensure that our cosmological constraints are unbiased. Finally, I will present cosmological constraints from applying this analysis framework to two samples of ~70,000 galaxies at redshifts z ~ 0.25 and z ~ 0.40. The derived cosmological constraints on sigma_8 are more stringent than any previous study targeting large linear scales only.