Statistical strong lensing. IV. Inferences with no individual source redshifts
By: Alessandro Sonnenfeld
Context. Strong lensing mass measurements require the knowledge of the redshift of both the lens and the source galaxy. Traditionally, spectroscopic redshifts are used for this purpose. Upcoming surveys, however, will lead to the discovery of ∼105 strong lenses, and it will be very difficult to obtain spectroscopic redshifts for most of them. Photometric redshift measurements will also be very challenging due to the blending between lens and ... more
Context. Strong lensing mass measurements require the knowledge of the redshift of both the lens and the source galaxy. Traditionally, spectroscopic redshifts are used for this purpose. Upcoming surveys, however, will lead to the discovery of ∼105 strong lenses, and it will be very difficult to obtain spectroscopic redshifts for most of them. Photometric redshift measurements will also be very challenging due to the blending between lens and source light.
Aims: The goal of this work is to demonstrate how to carry out an inference of the structural properties of the galaxy population from the analysis of a set of strong lenses with no individual source redshift measurements, and to assess the loss in precision compared to the case in which spectroscopic redshifts are available.
Methods: Building on the formalism introduced in Paper III, I developed a method that allows a statistical strong lensing inference to be carried out while marginalising over the source redshifts. This method, which relies on the knowledge of the properties of the unlensed background source population and of the selection function of the survey, generalises an approach known as photogeometric redshift, originally introduced by the Strong Lensing Legacy Survey collaboration. I tested the method on simulated data consisting of a subset of 137 strong lenses that is complete above a cut in observational space.
Results: The method recovers the properties of the galaxy population with a precision that is comparable to that attainable in the case in which individual source redshifts are known.
Conclusions: The photogeometric redshift method is a viable approach for the analysis of large sets of strong lenses provided that the background source population properties and lens selection function are well known. less
4 SciCasts by Alessandro Sonnenfeld.
Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice
By: Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron Courville, Marc G. Bellemare
Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice
By: Rishabh Agarwal, Max Schwarzer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Aaron Courville, Marc G. Bellemare
The Temperature of Hot Gas in the Universe
By: Eiichiro Komatsu; Yi-Kuan Chiang; Ryu Makiya; Brice Ménard
How hot is the Universe today? How hot was it before? We report on the result of the observational determination of the mean temperature of hot gas in the Universe. We find that the mean gas temperature has increased ten times over the last 8 billion years, to reach about 2 million Kelvin today. As cosmic structures form, matter density fluctuations collapse gravitationally and baryonic matter is shock-heated and thermalized. We therefore exp... more
How hot is the Universe today? How hot was it before? We report on the result of the observational determination of the mean temperature of hot gas in the Universe. We find that the mean gas temperature has increased ten times over the last 8 billion years, to reach about 2 million Kelvin today. As cosmic structures form, matter density fluctuations collapse gravitationally and baryonic matter is shock-heated and thermalized. We therefore expect a connection between the mean gravitational potential energy of collapsed halos and the mean thermal energy of baryons. Our result provides quantitative verification of such a connection via cosmic shock-heating. less
EGRU: Event-based GRU for activity-sparse inference and learning
By: Anand Subramoney, Khaleelulla Khan Nazeer, Mark Schöne, Christian Mayr, David Kappel
The scalability of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is hindered by the sequential dependence of each time step's computation on the previous time step's output. Therefore, one way to speed up and scale RNNs is to reduce the computation required at each time step independent of model size and task. In this paper, we propose a model that reformulates Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) as an event-based activity-sparse model that we call the Event-base... more
The scalability of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is hindered by the sequential dependence of each time step's computation on the previous time step's output. Therefore, one way to speed up and scale RNNs is to reduce the computation required at each time step independent of model size and task. In this paper, we propose a model that reformulates Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) as an event-based activity-sparse model that we call the Event-based GRU (EGRU), where units compute updates only on receipt of input events (event-based) from other units. When combined with having only a small fraction of the units active at a time (activity-sparse), this model has the potential to be vastly more compute efficient than current RNNs. Notably, activity-sparsity in our model also translates into sparse parameter updates during gradient descent, extending this compute efficiency to the training phase. We show that the EGRU demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art recurrent network models in real-world tasks, including language modeling while maintaining high activity sparsity naturally during inference and training. This sets the stage for the next generation of recurrent networks that are scalable and more suitable for novel neuromorphic hardware.
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Cosmic Birefringence in 2022
By: Patricia Diego-Palazuelos; Johannes R. Eskilt; Eiichiro Komatsu
The observed pattern of linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons is a sensitive probe of physics violating parity symmetry under inversion of spatial coordinates. A new parity-violating interaction might have rotated the plane of linear polarization by an angle β as the CMB photons have been traveling for more than 13 billion years. This effect is known as "cosmic birefringence." In this paper, we present new measu... more
The observed pattern of linear polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons is a sensitive probe of physics violating parity symmetry under inversion of spatial coordinates. A new parity-violating interaction might have rotated the plane of linear polarization by an angle β as the CMB photons have been traveling for more than 13 billion years. This effect is known as "cosmic birefringence." In this paper, we present new measurements of cosmic birefringence from a joint analysis of polarization data from two space missions, Planck and WMAP. This dataset covers a wide range of frequencies from 23 to 353 GHz. We measure β=0.342°+0.094°−0.091° (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data, which excludes β=0 at 99.987% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of 3.6σ. There is no evidence for frequency dependence of β. We find a similar result, albeit with a larger uncertainty, when removing the Galactic plane from the analysis. less
New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data
By: Yuto Minami; Eiichiro Komatsu
We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data, and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle, β. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining β and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the E-... more
We search for evidence of parity-violating physics in the Planck 2018 polarization data, and report on a new measurement of the cosmic birefringence angle, β. The previous measurements are limited by the systematic uncertainty in the absolute polarization angles of the Planck detectors. We mitigate this systematic uncertainty completely by simultaneously determining β and the angle miscalibration using the observed cross-correlation of the E- and B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background and the Galactic foreground emission. We show that the systematic errors are effectively mitigated and achieve a factor-of-2 smaller uncertainty than the previous measurement, finding β=0.35±0.14° (68% C.L.), which excludes β=0 at 99.2% C.L. This corresponds to the statistical significance of 2.4σ. less