Simulation Pipeline for Velocity Field Measurements using the Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

Author: Su, Yubo

Year: 2016

Degree: Senior thesis (Major)

Advisor: Golwala, Sunil

Committee Member: None, None

Option: Physics; Computer Science

DOI: 10.7907/727E-BW81

Abstract

The kinetic Sunyaev-Zel 'dovich (kSZ) effect is of great cosmological interest for providing precision measurements of peculiar velocity fields independent of systematics present in other cosmological probes. The high precision kSZ measurements on the horizon are expected to yield valuable constraints distinguishing between competing cosmological models. Instrumental to kSZ astromony is the removal of contaminating point sources, primarily radio and dusty, star-forming galaxies that have bright emissions in kSZ spectral bands. As the precision of measurements improve, the source removal residuals may become significant contributions to the overall kSZ error budget. A full simulation is essential to characterizing these induced errors. This study develops a procedure for contamination removal from first principles, verifying its optimality against information theoretic limits. Models for contaminating sources of increasing complexity are considered, at each step characterizing the optimality of the subtraction compared to theoretical bounds. The final, currently unfinished objective is to apply this subtraction procedure to a realistic source distribution and understand the incurred systematics.

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