🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 2 matches in 0.001059s)

  1. Topological Echoes of Primordial Physics in the Universe at Large Scales (2020)

    Alex Cole, Matteo Biagetti, Gary Shiu
    Abstract We present a pipeline for characterizing and constraining initial conditions in cosmology via persistent homology. The cosmological observable of interest is the cosmic web of large scale structure, and the initial conditions in question are non-Gaussianities (NG) of primordial density perturbations. We compute persistence diagrams and derived statistics for simulations of dark matter halos with Gaussian and non-Gaussian initial conditions. For computational reasons and to make contact with experimental observations, our pipeline computes persistence in sub-boxes of full simulations and simulations are subsampled to uniform halo number. We use simulations with large NG (\$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\=250\$) as templates for identifying data with mild NG (\$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\=10\$), and running the pipeline on several cubic volumes of size \$40~(\textrm\Gpc/h\)\textasciicircum\3\\$, we detect \$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\=10\$ at \$97.5\%\$ confidence on \$\sim 85\%\$ of the volumes for our best single statistic. Throughout we benefit from the interpretability of topological features as input for statistical inference, which allows us to make contact with previous first-principles calculations and make new predictions.

  2. The Persistence of Large Scale Structures I: Primordial Non-Gaussianity (2020)

    Matteo Biagetti, Alex Cole, Gary Shiu
    Abstract We develop an analysis pipeline for characterizing the topology of large scale structure and extracting cosmological constraints based on persistent homology. Persistent homology is a technique from topological data analysis that quantifies the multiscale topology of a data set, in our context unifying the contributions of clusters, filament loops, and cosmic voids to cosmological constraints. We describe how this method captures the imprint of primordial local non-Gaussianity on the late-time distribution of dark matter halos, using a set of N-body simulations as a proxy for real data analysis. For our best single statistic, running the pipeline on several cubic volumes of size \$40~(\rm\Gpc/h\)\textasciicircum\3\\$, we detect \$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\=10\$ at \$97.5\%\$ confidence on \$\sim 85\%\$ of the volumes. Additionally we test our ability to resolve degeneracies between the topological signature of \$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\\$ and variation of \$\sigma_8\$ and argue that correctly identifying nonzero \$f_\\rm NL\\textasciicircum\\rm loc\\$ in this case is possible via an optimal template method. Our method relies on information living at \$\mathcal\O\(10)\$ Mpc/h, a complementary scale with respect to commonly used methods such as the scale-dependent bias in the halo/galaxy power spectrum. Therefore, while still requiring a large volume, our method does not require sampling long-wavelength modes to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity. Moreover, our statistics are interpretable: we are able to reproduce previous results in certain limits and we make new predictions for unexplored observables, such as filament loops formed by dark matter halos in a simulation box.