Using Neural Networks to Maximize Cosmological Information Extraction from Planck Maps of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

THE PROPOSED RESEARCH WILL FOCUS ON TWO PRIMARY SCIENCE GOALS: (1) EXTRACTING HIGHER-ORDER STATISTICS (E.G. THE BISPECTRUM) FROM TSZ MAPS PRODUCED USING PLANCK DATA AND INFERRING COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS IN COMBINATION WITH THE TSZ POWER SPECTRUM WHICH WILL ALLOW DEGENERACIES BETWEEN COSMOLOGICAL AND BARYONIC-PHYSICS PARAMETERS TO BE BROKEN AND (2) APPLYING NOVEL MACHINE-LEARNING METHODS TO DIRECTLY EXTRACT THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF COSMOLOGICAL INFORMATION IN THE AFOREMENTIONED TSZ MAPS WITHOUT RELYING ON ANY PARTICULAR SUMMARY STATISTIC. THESE SCIENCE GOALS WILL BE FURTHER ENHANCED BY ANALYZING TSZ MAPS MADE FROM A COMBINATION OF PLANCK DATA AND DATA FROM HIGH-RESOLUTION GROUND BASED CMB EXPERIMENTS IN PARTICULAR THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE (ACT). THE PLANCK-ONLY TSZ MAPS ARE LIMITED TO 10-ARCMINUTE ANGULAR RESOLUTION DUE TO THE RESOLUTION OF THE MID-FREQUENCY PLANCK CHANNELS WHICH ARE CRUCIAL FOR TSZ EXTRACTION BY COMBINING PLANCK AND ACT DATA THE ACT TEAM HAS CONSTRUCTED PUBLICLY AVAILABLE TSZ MAPS WITH ROUGHLY 2-ARCMINUTE ANGULAR RESOLUTION WHICH WE WILL ANALYZE. THE OUTCOMES OF THIS RESEARCH PROGRAM WILL BE NEW MEASUREMENTS OF TSZ HIGHER-ORDER STATISTICS ON AN UNPRECEDENTEDLY BROAD RANGE OF ANGULAR SCALES NEW CONSTRAINTS ON DARK ENERGY AND THE NEUTRINO MASS DERIVED FROM THESE STATISTICS AND THE FIRST APPLICATION OF A NOVEL MACHINE-LEARNING FRAMEWORK TO DIRECTLY EXTRACT COSMOLOGICAL INFORMATION FROM WIDE-AREA TSZ MAPS. THIS WORK IS DIRECTLY RELATED TO TWO KEY NASA ASTROPHYSICS SCIENCE OBJECTIVES: 'HOW DOES THE UNIVERSE WORK?' AND 'HOW DID WE GET HERE?' THE PROPOSED RESEARCH ADDRESSES THE FIRST QUESTION BY YIELDING NEW CONSTRAINTS ON THE BEHAVIOR OF DARK ENERGY AND THE PROPERTIES OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUENTS OF THE UNIVERSE AS WELL AS BY APPLYING NEW ANALYSIS METHODS TO ENABLE MORE SENSITIVE SEARCHES FOR NEW PHYSICS IN THE COSMOS. THE INVESTIGATION ADDRESSES THE SECOND QUESTION BY MAPPING THE DISTRIBUTION OF THERMAL GAS PRESSURE THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE WHICH IS A DIRECT PROBE OF COSMIC STRUCTURE FORMATION AND FEEDBACK PROCESSES ASSOCIATED WITH GALAXY FORMATION ON SMALL SCALES.