No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis will present a new cosmic shear analysis pipeline SUNGLASS (Simulated UNiverses for Gravitational Lensing Analysis and Shear Surveys). SUNGLASS is a pipeline that rapidly generates simulated universes for weak lensing and cosmic shear analysis. The pipeline forms suites of cosmological N-body simulations and performs tomographic cosmic shear analysis using a novel line-of-sight integration through the simulations while saving the particle lightcone information. Galaxy shear and convergence catalogues with realistic 3-D galaxy redshift distributions are produced for the purposes of testing weak lensing analysis techniques and generating covariance matrices for data analysis and cosmological parameter estimation. This thesis presents a suite of fast medium-resolution simulations with shear and convergence maps for a generic 100 square degree survey out to a redshift of z = 1.5, with angular power spectra agreeing with the theoretical expectations to better than a few percent accuracy up to ℓ = 103 for all source redshifts up to z = 1.5 and wavenumbers up to ℓ = 2000 for source redshifts z ≥ 1.1. A two-parameter Gaussian likelihood analysis of Ωm and σ8 is also performed on the suite of simulations for a 2-D weak lensing survey, demonstrating that the cosmological parameters are recovered from the simulations and the covariance matrices are stable for data analysis, with negligible bias. An investigation into the accuracy of traditional Fisher matrix calculations is presented. Fisher Information Matrix methods are commonly used in cosmology to estimate the accuracy that cosmological parameters can be measured with a given experiment, and to optimise the design of experiments. However, the standard approach usually assumes both data and parameter estimates are Gaussian-distributed. Further, for survey forecasts and optimisation it is usually assumed the power-spectra covariance matrix is diagonal in Fourier-space. But in the low-redshift Universe, non-linear mode-coupling will tend to correlate small-scale power, moving information from lower to higher-order moments of the field. This movement of information will change the predictions of cosmological parameter accuracy. In this thesis, the loss of information is quantified by comparing näıve Gaussian Fisher matrix forecasts with a Maximum Likelihood parameter estimation analysis of the suite of mock weak lensing catalogues derived from the SUNGLASS pipeline, for 2-D and tomographic shear analyses of a Euclid-like survey. In both cases the 68% confidence area of the Ωm − σ8 plane is found to increase by a factor 5. However, the marginal errors increase by just 20 to 40%. A new method is proposed to model the effects of non-linear shear-power mode-coupling in the Fisher Matrix by approximating the shear-power distribution as a multivariate Gaussian with a covariance matrix derived from the mock weak lensing survey. The findings in this thesis show that this approximation can reproduce the 68% confidence regions of the full Maximum Likelihood analysis in the Ωm − σ8 plane to high accuracy for both 2-D and tomographic weak lensing surveys. Finally, three multi-parameter analyses of (Ωm, σ8, ns), (Ωm, σ8, ns, ΩΛ)and (Ωm, σ8, h, ns, w0, wa) are performed to compare the Gaussian and non-linear mode-coupled Fisher matrix contours. The multi-parameter volumes of the 1σ error contours for the six-parameter non-linear Fisher analysis are consistently larger than for the Gaussian case, and the shape of the 68% confidence volume is modified. These results strongly suggest that future Fisher Matrix estimates of cosmological parameter accuracies should include mode-coupling effects.

We perform a measurement of the mass-richness relation of the redMaPPer galaxy cluster catalogue using weak lensing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We have carefully characterized a broad range of systematic uncertainties, including shear calibration errors, photo-z biases, dilution by member galaxies, source obscuration, magnification bias, incorrect assumptions about cluster mass profiles, cluster centring, halo triaxiality and projection effects. We also compare measurements of the lensing signal from two independently produced shear and photometric redshift catalogues to characterize systematic errors in the lensing signal itself. Using a sample of 5570 clusters from 0.1 <= z <= 0.33, the normalization of our power-law mass versus. relation is log(10)[M-200m/ h-M-1(circle dot)] = 14.344 +/- 0.021 (statistical) +/- 0.023 (systematic) at a richness lambda= 40, a 7 per cent calibration uncertainty, with a power-law index of 1.33(- 0.10)(+0.09) (1 sigma). The detailed systematics characterization in this work renders it the definitive weak lensing mass calibration for SDSS redMaPPer clusters at this time.

The purpose of this study was to investigate some theoretical approaches to the scattering of positive k-mesons by nucleons in an attempt to explain the experimental data. In this work the problem has been investigated by the technique of the weak coupling approximation.

Student Number : 9900131F - MSc (Eng) dissertation - School of Mechanical Engineering - Faculty of Engineering / Recent high-resolution numerical studies of weak shock reflections have shown that a complex flow structure exists behind the triple point which consists of multiple shocks, expansion fans and triple points. This region had not been detected earlier in experimental observations or numerical studies of weak shock reflections due to the small size of this region. New components were designed and built to modify an existing large-scale shock tube in order to obtain experimental observations to validate the numerical results. The shock tube produced a large, expanding cylindrical incident wave which was reflected off a 15° corner on the roof of the section to produce a weak shock Mach reflection with a large Mach stem in the test section. The shock tube was equipped with PCB high-speed pressure transducers and digital scope for data acquisition, and a schlieren optical system to visualise the region behind the triple point. The tests were conducted over a range of incident wave Mach numbers (M12 = 1.060-1.094) and produced Mach stems of between 694 mm and 850 mm in length. The schlieren photographs clearly show an expansion fan centered on the triple point in all the successful tests conducted. In some of the more resolved images, a shocklet can be seen terminating the expansion fan, and in others a second expansion fan and/or shocklet can be seen. A ‘von Neumann reflection’ was not visualised experimentally, and hence it has been proposed that the four-wave reflection found in these tests be named a ‘Guderley reflection’. The experimental validation of Hunter & Tesdall’s (2002) work resolves the ‘von Neumann Paradox’.

Weak gravitational lensing is now well established as a powerful cosmological probe, particularly for studying large scale structure growth in the Universe. The vast majority of weak lensing experiments to date use optical and near infrared observations which are well suited to the requirements in source densities and shape analysis. In this thesis we outline the prospects associated with weak lensing surveys from radio observations. This can offer key advantages to optical counterpart studies such as the well defined observing beam pattern of a radio telescope and a window into a much broader observed redshift distribution. In addition to the prospect of radio weak lensing surveys alone, combining with optical counterparts in a cross-correlation study has been shown to mitigate uncorrelated systematics, further motivating the case for radio based weak lensing studies. The correlation of galaxy shapes through multi-wavelength observations will affect the noise on the cosmological power spectrum in cross-correlation analysis. We use radio and optical observations of the COSMOS field with the VLA and HST respectively, accompanied with simulations for calibration in order to measure shape correlations between wavelength regimes. Although we do not detect a correlation between optical and radio shapes, a lower limit on the intrinsic astrophysical scatter was placed at >0.212pi (or 38.2 degrees), through a Monte Carlo simulation of source catalogues with the measured uncertainties. The SuperCLASS experiment aims to measure a weak lensing signal with radio observations from a super-cluster field. We introduce the radio data, collected with the e-MERLIN and JVLA, and the reduction steps taken. Assisted by simulations, we have designed a shape measurement pipeline (SuperTRAP) which performs additional phase rotation and averaging steps to extract visibility sets on a source by source basis followed by image plane shape analysis. A series of staged tests of increasing complexity are outlined here and evaluated by the shape recovery bias and efficiency. Finally we present the optical counterpart observations and shape analysis for the SuperCLASS field, with data collected by the Subaru Suprime-Cam. Observational systematics are measured to form representative PSF models in each CCD exposure and the subsequent shape analysis from the I band photometry is presented. Shear analysis from the measured power spectrum shows good agreement with theoretical predictions. From the measured shear power spectrum we detect a strong signal in the E-mode band powers, equivalent to a 9.31sigma detection. Our measurements from the B-mode and E-B cross band powers suggest negligible contamination from systematics. The optical analysis presented here will provide the counterpart analysis to the radio for future cross-correlation studies.

Until relatively recently, synonymous codons have been thought to be under very little evolutionary constraint. That has changed, and now codon bias (the preferential use of a subset of synonymous codons for each degenerate amino acid) is being observed in nearly every organism in which it is adequately searched for. Synonymous codons are evolving under weak selection. As such, it is expected that the selective forces driving the distributions of these codons to be more efficient in species with larger effective population sizes than species with smaller population sizes. With this in mind I investigate patterns of weak selection in the Drosophila subobscura species complex. D. subobscura is a widespread, continental species with a Palearctic distribution. In contrast, its sister species D. guanche and D. madeirensis are island endemic species with low population sizes that each share a relatively recent common ancestor with D. subobscura. In Chapter 2, I investigate patterns of molecular divergence between D. subobscura and the two island species. I show that there is considerable selection acting on synonymous codons in D. subobscura, but not as strong in the island species (although it still exists). The main consequence of this is that purifying selection acting against unpreferred codons is active in D. subobscura, but synonymous codons are much less constrained in the island species. This causes the common measurement of the ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous mutations to appear larger in D. subobscura while both components are actually increased in the island species. In Chapter 3, I focus on D. subobscura and look at patterns of polymorphism within this species. I show that there is a genome wide skew towards low frequency variants, while only the unpreferred to preferred mutation class segregates at higher than expected frequencies. This is indicative of purifying selection acting upon most of the genome, and positive selection pushing preferred codons to higher frequencies.

Let G be a group. A Weak Cayley Table mapping ϕ : G → G is a bijection such that ϕ(g1g2) is conjugate to ϕ(g1)ϕ(g2) for all g1, g2 in G. The set of all such mappings forms a group W(G) under composition. We study W(G) for the seventeen wallpaper groups G.