Precision Cosmology with Weak Gravitational Lensing and Galaxy Populations
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Precision Cosmology with Weak Gravitational Lensing and Galaxy Populations DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jenna Kay Cunli↵e Freudenburg Graduate Program in Astronomy The Ohio State University 2020 Dissertation Committee: Professor Christopher M. Hirata, Advisor Professor David H. Weinberg Professor Adam K. Leroy Copyright by Jenna Kay Cunli↵e Freudenburg 2020 Abstract Dark energy, the hypothesized cause of the universe’s accelerating expansion, is the mystery that drives modern cosmology. To gain insight into the physical causes of acceleration, upcoming large-scale imaging surveys will provide statistical constraints on the standard cosmological model. Weak gravitational lensing, an essential probe of large-scale structure, is a key phenomenon whose observation comprises a vital part of these missions. Exquisite precision is required to take full advantage of weak lensing in the coming decades. This dissertation presents two new weak-lensing methods for achieving such precision, while also opening the door to advances in galaxy formation/evolution and other areas of astrophysics. Galaxy-galaxy lensing is an essential tool for probing dark matter halos and constraining cosmological parameters. While galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements usually rely on shear, weak-lensing magnification contains additional constraining information. Using the fundamental plane (FP) of elliptical galaxies to anchor the size distribution of a background population is one method that has been proposed for performing a magnification measurement. In the first part of this dissertation, I present a formalism for using the FP residuals of elliptical galaxies to jointly estimate the foreground mass and background redshift errors for a stacked lens ii scenario. The FP residuals include information about weak-lensing magnification , and therefore foreground mass, since to first order, nonzero a↵ects galaxy size but not other FP properties. I also present a modular, extensible code that implements the formalism using emulated galaxy catalogs of a photometric galaxy survey. I find that combining FP information with observed number counts of the source galaxies constrains mass and photo-z error parameters significantly better than an estimator that includes number counts only. In particular, the constraint on the mass is 17.0% if FP residuals are included, as opposed to 27.7% when only number counts are 14 included. The e↵ective size noise for a foreground lens of mass MH =10 M ,with aconservativeselectionfunctioninsizeandsurfacebrightnessappliedtothesource population, is σ,e↵ =0.250. I discuss the improvements to the FP model necessary to make this formalism a practical companion to shear analyses in weak lensing surveys. The weak-lensing shear signal is very small and accurate measurement depends critically on the ability to understand how non-ideal instrumental e↵ects a↵ect astronomical images. The Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST) will fly a focal plane containing 18 Teledyne H4RG-10 near infrared detector arrays, which present di↵erent instrument calibration challenges from previous weak lensing observations. Previous work has shown that correlation functions of flat field images, including cross-correlations between di↵erent time slices that are enabled by the non-destructive read capability of the infrared detectors, are e↵ective iii tools for disentangling linear and non-linear inter-pixel capacitance (IPC) and the brighter-fatter e↵ect (BFE). In the second part of this dissertation, I present a Fourier-domain treatment of the flat field correlations, which allows expansion of the previous formalism to all orders in IPC, BFE, and classical non-linearity. I show that biases in simulated flat field analyses are greatly reduced through the use of this formalism. I then apply this updated formalism to flat field data from three Roman Space Telescope flight candidate detectors, and explore the robustness to variations in the analysis. I find that the BFE is present in all three detectors, and that its contribution to the flat field correlations dominates over the non-linear IPC, in accordance with previous results on a development detector. The magnitude of 7 the BFE is such that the e↵ective area of a pixel is increased by (3.54 0.03) 10− ± ⇥ for every electron deposited in a neighboring pixel (sensor chip assembly [SCA] 20829, statistical error, not IPC-deconvolved). I compare IPC maps from flat field autocorrelation measurements to those obtained from the single pixel reset method and find a median di↵erence of 0.113% for SCA 20829. After further diagnosis of this di↵erence, I ascribe it largely to an additional source of cross-talk, the vertical trailing pixel e↵ect, and recommend further work to develop a model for this e↵ect. These results represent a significant step toward calibration of the non-ideal e↵ects in Roman Space Telescope detectors. iv Dedication To Jake, who has crossed oceans for me. v Acknowledgments My thanks goes first and foremost to the teachers and mentors who have guided me on my rather meandering academic path. Chris Hirata has been exactly the advisor I needed, a calm and reassuring counselor in the midst of all the ups and downs of my graduate career. Thanks for everything, Chris. My thanks also to Eric Hu↵, who taught me how to be a good collaborator, to David Weinberg, Adam Leroy, Wayne Schlingman, Ami Choi, Kristy Krehnovi, Lisa Colarosa, and the rest of the OSU Astronomy Department and CCAPP. It truly takes a village–I appreciate you all! Thanks to Nikhil Padmanabhan, who made me believe I could be a researcher; Meg Urry, who has been my biggest cheerleader since my very first day in the Yale physics department; Mark Harris, who has blazed the path of science and faith and shown me how to follow; and Mr. Sinclair, stubbornly loyal Buckeye, whose utter commitment and inspired teaching launched me on this journey. Ihavebeenblessedwiththecompanionshipofmarvelouspeersandfellow travellers. Thanks to my brilliant colleagues Jahmour and Makana for their patience and good humor–I’ve learned so much from you both! Chris, I’m so grateful for your friendship and kindred musical spirit. Rachel and Jerry, thank you for always reminding me about how fun this whole science thing can be–I’m so glad you’re vi my friends! And a very special thank you to Joel–you had me at plesiosaur, and I couldn’t have done this without you. Astronomy is my work, but faith and music are the fuel that keeps me going. Thanks to my church and choir families at St. Thomas’s New Haven, St. Mark’s Columbus, St. Joseph Cathedral, Trinity Columbus, Lancaster Chorale, St Giles’ Cathedral, the Yale ISM, and most of all, First Presbyterian Church in Evansville, IN. You’ve brought me so much joy! Finally, all my gratitude to my family. My sisters and absolute rocks Katy and Marie, my better-than-cousins Annah and Paul, my godparents and home-away- from-home Kirk and Judi, the entire Cunli↵e clan, my parents and first best teachers Gene and Sheryl, and my dear husband and partner Jake. Your support means the world to me and I love you all. Land Acknowledgement The Ohio State University rests on the homelands of the Myaamia (Miami) people.1 As a student at Ohio State, I have benefited not only from physical location on the land of which the Myaamia people were caretakers until their forced removal in 1846, but also from the transfer of wealth from Indigenous peoples to the state of Ohio under the Morrill Act.2 This wealth, with which the university was founded, 1http://native-land.ca/maps/territories/miami 2http://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/opinion/land-grant-universities-native-americans.html vii includes money raised from the sale of lands of the Ojibwe people, the Osage people, the Kaw Nation, the Odawa people, and the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, among others.3 Technical Acknowledgements Ithanktheco-authorsofthepapersonwhichmuchofdissertationisbased, including Chris Hirata, Eric Hu↵, Jahmour Givans, and Ami Choi. IacknowledgesupportinthepreparationofthisworkfromSimonsFoundation award 60052667; US Department of Energy award DE-SC0019083; and NASA award 15-WFIRST15-0008. Computations for this dissertation were carried out at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (1987). Parts of this dissertation are based on data acquired at the Detector Characterization Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Software used: Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), fitsio (Sheldon 2019), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (van der Walt et al. 2011), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), GetDist (Lewis et al. 2019), IPython (P´erez & Granger 2007), Jupyter (Kluyver et al. 2016), pandas (McKinney et al. 2010), PyGraphviz (Hagberg et al. 2006), tqdm (da Costa-Luis & Casper 2019) 3http://www.landgrabu.org/universities/ohio-state-university viii Vita August 27, 1990 ..................... Born – Saint Louis, MO, USA 2013 ................................. B.S. Physics (Intensive), Yale University 2014 ................................. M.Sc. Science and Religion, The University of Edinburgh 2014 – 2020 .......................... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University Publications Research Publications 1. D.H. Weinberg, B.H. Andrews, and J. Freudenburg, “Equilibrium and Sudden Events in Chemical Evolution”, ApJ, 837, 183, (2017). 2. J.K.C. Freudenburg, D.H. Weinberg, M.R. Hayden, and J.A. Holtzman, ‘The Chemical Abundance Structure of the Inner Milky Way: A Signature