Cosmic shear is one of the most powerful probes of Dark Energy, targeted by several current and future galaxy surveys. Lensing shear, however, is only sampled at the positions of galaxies with measured shapes in the catalog, making its associated sky window function one of the most complicated amongst all projected cosmological probes of inhomogeneities, as well as giving rise to inhomogeneous noise. Partly for this reason, cosmic shear analyses have been mostly carried out in real-space, making use of correlation functions, as opposed to Fourier-space power spectra. Since the use of power spectra can yield complementary information and has numerical advantages over real-space pipelines, it is important to develop a complete formalism describing the standard unbiased power spectrum estimators as well as their associated uncertainties. Building on previous work, this paper contains a study of the main complications associated with estimating and interpreting shear power spectra, and presents fast and accurate methods to estimate two key quantities needed for their practical usage: the noise bias and the Gaussian covariance matrix, fully accounting for survey geometry, with some of these results also applicable to other cosmological probes. We demonstrate the performance of these methods by applying them to the latest public data releases of the Hyper Suprime-Cam and the Dark Energy Survey collaborations, quantifying the presence of systematics in our measurements and the validity of the covariance matrix estimate. We make the resulting power spectra, covariance matrices, null tests and all associated data necessary for a full cosmological analysis publicly available.

The disconnected part of the power spectrum covariance matrix (also known as the "Gaussian" covariance) is the dominant contribution on large scales for galaxy clustering and weak lensing datasets. The presence of a complicated sky mask causes non-trivial correlations between different Fourier/harmonic modes, which must be accurately characterized in order to obtain reliable cosmological constraints. This is particularly relevant for galaxy survey data. Unfortunately, an exact calculation of these correlations involves O( 6 max ) operations that become computationally impractical very quickly. We present an implementation of approximate methods to estimate the Gaussian covariance matrix of power spectra involving spin-0 and spin-2 flat-and curved-sky fields, expanding on existing algorithms. These methods achieve an O( 3 max ) scaling, which makes the computation of the covariance matrix as fast as the computation of the power spectrum itself. We quantify the accuracy of these methods on large-scale structure and weak lensing data, making use of a large number of Gaussian but otherwise realistic simulations. We show that, using the approximate covariance matrix, we are able to recover the true posterior distribution of cosmological parameters to high accuracy. We also quantify the shortcomings of these methods, which become unreliable on the very largest scales, as well as for covariance matrix elements involving cosmic shear B modes. The algorithms presented here are implemented in the public code NaMaster https://github.com/LSSTDESC/NaMaster.

The possibility of linking inflation and late cosmic accelerated expansion using the α-attractor models has received increasing attention due to their physical motivation. In the early universe, α-attractors provide an inflationary mechanism compatible with Planck satellite CMB observations and predictive for future gravitational wave CMB modes. Additionally α-attractors can be written as quintessence models with a potential that connects a power law regime with a plateau or uplifted exponential, allowing a late cosmic accelerated expansion that can mimic behavior near a cosmological constant. In this paper we study a generalized dark energy α-attractor model. We thoroughly investigate its phenomenology, including the role of all model parameters and the possibility of large-scale tachyonic instability clustering. We verify the relation that 1 + w ∼ 1/α (while the gravitational wave power r ∼ α) so these models predict that a signature should appear in either the primordial B-modes or in late time deviation from a cosmological constant. We constrain the model parameters with current datasets, including the cosmic microwave background (Planck 2015 angular power spectrum, polarization and lensing), baryon acoustic oscillations (BOSS DR12) and supernovae (Pantheon compressed). Our results show that expansion histories close to a cosmological constant exist in large regions of the parameter space, not requiring a fine-tuning of the parameters or initial conditions.

In order to investigate the origin of the ongoing tension between the amplitude of matter fluctuations measured by weak lensing experiments at low redshifts and the value inferred from the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, we reconstruct the evolution of this amplitude from z ∼ 2 using existing large-scale structure data. To do so, we decouple the linear growth of density inhomogeneities from the background expansion, and constrain its redshift dependence making use of a combination of 6 different data sets, including cosmic shear, galaxy clustering and CMB lensing. We analyze these data under a consistent harmonic-space angular power spectrum-based pipeline. We show that current data constrain the amplitude of fluctuations mostly in the range 0.2 < z < 0.7, where it is lower than predicted by Planck. This difference is mostly driven by current cosmic shear data, although the growth histories reconstructed from different data combinations are consistent with each other, and we find no evidence of systematic deviations in any particular experiment. In

No abstract

We present a re-analysis of cosmic shear and galaxy clustering from first-year Dark Energy Survey data (DES Y1), making use of a Hybrid Effective Field Theory (HEFT) approach to model the galaxy-matter relation on weakly non-linear scales, initially proposed in [1]. This allows us to explore the enhancement in cosmological constraining power enabled by extending the galaxy clustering scale range typically used in projected large-scale structure analyses. Our analysis is based on a recomputed harmonic-space data vector and covariance matrix, carefully accounting for all sources of mode-coupling, non-Gaussianity and shot noise, which allows us to provide robust goodness-of-fit measures. We use the AbacusSummit suite of simulations to build an emulator for the HEFT model predictions. We find that this model can explain the galaxy clustering and shear data up to wavenumbers kmax∼ 0.6 Mpc-1. We constrain (S8,Ωm) = (0.786± 0.020,0.273+0.030 -0.036) at the fiducial kmax∼ 0.3 Mpc-1, improving to (S8,Ωm) = (0.786+0.015 -0.018,0.266+0.024 -0.027) at kmax∼ 0.5 Mpc-1. This represents a ∼10% and ∼35% improvement on the constraints derived respectively on both parameters using a linear bias relation on a reduced scale range (kmax≲0.15 Mpc-1), in spite of the 15 additional parameters involved in the HEFT model. We investigate whether HEFT can be used to constrain the Hubble parameter and find H0= 70.7-3.5 +3.0 km s-1 Mpc-1. Our constraints are investigative and subject to certain caveats discussed in the text.

The Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) traces the emission of star-forming galaxies throughout all cosmic epochs. Breaking down the contribution from galaxies at different redshifts to the observed CIB maps would allow us to probe the history of star formation. In this paper, we cross-correlate maps of the CIB with galaxy samples covering the range z ≲ 2 to measure the bias-weighted star-formation rate (SFR) density 〈bρSFR〉 as a function of time in a model independent way. This quantity is complementary to direct measurements of the SFR density ρSFR, giving a higher weight to more massive haloes, and thus provides additional information to constrain the physical properties of star formation. Using cross-correlations of the CIB with galaxies from the DESI Legacy Survey and the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, we obtain high signal-to-noise ratio measurements of 〈bρSFR〉, which we then use to place constraints on halo-based models of the star-formation history. We fit halo-based SFR models to our data and compare the recovered ρSFR with direct measurements of this quantity. We find a qualitatively good agreement between both independent datasets, although the details depend on the specific halo model assumed. This constitutes a useful robustness test for the physical interpretation of the CIB, and reinforces the role of CIB maps as valuable astrophysical probes of the large-scale structure. We report our measurements of 〈bρSFR〉 as well as a thorough account of their statistical uncertainties, which can be used to constrain star-formation models in combination with other data.

The late time acceleration of the Universe can be characterized in terms of an extra, time dependent, component of the universe -dark energy. The simplest proposal for dark energy is a scalar-tensor theory -quintessence -which consists of a scalar field, φ , whose dynamics is solely dictated by its potential, V (φ ). Such a theory can be uniquely characterized by the equation of state of the scalar field energy momentum-tensor. We find the time dependence of the equation of state for a broad family of potentials and, using this information, we propose an analytic prior distribution for the most commonly used parametrization. We show that this analytic prior can be used to accurately predict the distribution of observables for the next generation of cosmological surveys. Including the theoretical priors in the comparison with observations considerably improves the constraints on the equation of state.