This thesis explores methods of detecting dark matter particles, with some emphasis on several dark matter models of current interest. Detection in this context means observation of an experimental signature correlated with dark matter interactions with Standard Model particles. This includes recoils of nuclei or electrons from dark matter scattering events, and direct or indirect observation of particles produced by dark matter annihilation. / Physics

We present a series of numerical galaxy formation studies which apply new numerical methods to produce increasingly realistic galaxy formation models. We first investigate the metallicity evolution of a large set of idealized hydrodynamical galaxy merger simulations of colliding galaxies. We find that inflows of metal--poor interstellar gas triggered by galaxy tidal interactions can account for the systematically lower central oxygen abundances observed in local interacting galaxies. We show the central metallicity evolution during merger events is determined by a competition between the inflow of low--metallicity gas and enrichment from star formation. We find a time-averaged depression in the galactic nuclear metallicity of ~0.07 dex for gas--poor disk--disk interactions, which explains the observed close pair mass-metallicity and separation-metallicity relationships. / Astronomy

In this thesis, I explore how the environments of both galaxy and cluster-scale strong gravitational lenses affect studies of cosmology and the properties of the earliest galaxies. Galaxy-scale lenses with measured time delays can be used to determine the Hubble constant, given an accurate lens model. However, perturbations from structures along the line of sight can introduce errors into the measurement. I use data from a survey towards known lenses in group environments to calculate the external shear in these systems, which is typically marginalized over in standard lens analyses. In three of six systems where I compare the independently-calculated environment shear to lens model shears, the quantities disagree at greater than 95% confidence. We explore possible sources of this disagreement. Using these data, I generate fiducial lines of sight and insert mock lenses with assumed input physical and cosmological parameters and find that those parameters can be recovered with ∼ 5-10% scatter when uncertainties in my characterization of the environment are applied. The lenses in groups have larger bias and scatter. I predict how well new time delay lenses from LSST will constrain H₀ and find that an ensemble of 500 quad lenses will recover H₀ with ∼ 2% bias with ∼ 0.3% precision. On larger scales, galaxy cluster lenses can magnify the earliest galaxies into detectability. While past studies have focused on single massive clusters, I investigate the properties of lines of sight, or "beams", containing multiple cluster-scale halos in projection. Even for beams of similar total mass, those with multiple halos have higher lensing cross sections on average. The optimal configurations for maximizing the cross section are also those that maximize faint z ∼ 10 detections. I present a new selection technique to identify beams in wide-area photometric surveys that contain high total masses and often multiple clusters in projection as traced by luminous red galaxies. I apply this technique to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and present the 200 most promising beams. Several are confirmed spectroscopically to be among the highest mass beams known with some containing multiple clusters. These are among the best fields to search for faint high-redshift galaxies.

This dissertation focuses on determining the properties of the environments and the line-of-sight mass distributions for a sample of strong gravitational lenses as well as establishing their effects on the observed lens properties and the Hubble constant.Strong gravitational lenses ought to be able to provide important constraints for cosmology, however the lack of understanding of their large--scale environments has hindered their use. Here, we present a spectroscopic survey of the environments and lines of sight of 28 strong galaxy--mass lenses. We determine redshifts for 9698 galaxies in the fields of these lenses and identify 163 structures with at least five members in 26 fields. We find that 12 of 26 lenses are group members. Six of these groups are newly discovered. Overall, between 38--67% of lenses are in groups, and in 8--31% of the lenses the group makes a significant contribution to the lens potential. Line-of-sight structures are present in virtually every lens field, and in 19% of lenses the structures appear to be a significant perturbation to the lens potential. We consider the effect of the environment on H0 derived from gravitational lenses. We find that, when the environment is ignored, lenses in groups predict a systematically higher value of H0, inconsistent at the 1 sigma level with H0 derived from isolated lenses. Correcting for the environment and line of sight structures brings the two values into agreement and lowers the combined value (H=66-3.2+3.4). Without correction for the environment, the H0 values from strong lenses should be considered a strict upper limit. We explore the correlation between the observed lens properties and external perturbations from the observational perspective. We find that four-image lenses are statistically more likely to be in groups than two-image lenses. Furthermore, the distributions of convergences are statistically different for quads and doubles. This finding strongly supports the idea that the high quad-to-double ratios are at least partially due to the effect of the environment. We also examine the connections between flux anomalies and environment and the correlations between image separations and convergence. We find no significant links due to the limitations of our sample.

Within the past decade, the CDM model has emerged as a standard paradigm of structure formation. While it has been very successful in explaining the structure of the Universe on large scales, on smaller (galactic) scales problems have surfaced. In this thesis, we investigate several of these problems in more detail. The thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, we give a brief introduction about structure formation in the universe and discuss some of the problems being faced by the current CDM paradigm of galaxy formation.In Chapter 2, we analyze the angular momentum properties of virialized halos obtained from hydrodynamical simulations. We describe an analytical function that can be used to describe a wide variety of angular momentum distributions (AMDs), with just one parameter α. About $90-95% of halos turn out to haveα < 1.3, while exponential disks in cosmological halos would require 1.3 < α < 1.6. This implies that a typical halo in simulations has an excess of low angular momentum material as compared to that of observed exponential disks, a result which is consistent with the findings of earlier works.In Chapter 3, we perform controlled numerical experiments of merging galactic halos in order to shed light on the results obtained in cosmological simulations. We explore the properties of shape parameter α of AMDs and the spin ratio λGas/λDM in merger remnants and also their dependence on orbital parameters. We find that the shape parameter α is typically close to 1 for a wide range of orbital parameters, less than what is needed to form an exponential disk.The last chapter of the thesis (Chapter 4) is devoted to the analysis of phase space structure of dark matter halos. We first present a method to numerically estimate the densities of discretely sampled data based on a binary space partitioning tree. We implement an entropy-based node splitting criterion that results in a significant improvement in the estimation of densities compared to earlier work. We use this technique to analyze the phase space structure of halos.

In this dissertation, we consider the variable chaplygin gas (VCG) model as derived from the Tachyon gas model and search for a sub-class of models that provide an adequate fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. We find that, for an appropriate choice of VCG parameters, up to ~ 80% of the VCG collapses into a gravitationally bound condensate which behaves as matter; the evolution of the remaining VCG, as governed by its equation of state, brings about accelerated expansion at late times. In light of this high collapsed fraction, we approximate the VCG transfer function with that of cold dark matter. We show that we can sufficiently describe the VCG cosmology from decoupling to today in terms of a model in which the gravitationally bound condensate plays the role of cold dark matter and the remaining VCG takes the place of dark energy in the concordance model. We then compute the CMB temperature anisotropy spectrum for a subset of VCG models and proceed to find a best-fit model to the WMAP-9yr data [46]. Our best-fit model has a x² per degrees of freedom of 2.03. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

The discovery of cosmic acceleration has prompted the need for a new understanding of cosmology. The presence of this acceleration is often described as the dark energy problem or the Lambda problem.The simplest explanation is that the acceleration is due to addition of a cosmological constant to Einstein's equation, but this resolution is unsatisfactory as it leaves several unanswered questions. Although General Relativity has been tested in the strong-field limit, the apparent dark energy may be urging us to consider experimental cosmology as such a test for large scales. In this vein, I have pursued a study of modifications to Einstein's gravity as well as possible related quantum gravity phenomenology. Not only must the details of modified gravities be worked out, but their impact on other astrophysics must be checked. For example, structure formation provides a strong test of any cosmic acceleration model because a successful dark energy model must not inhibit the development of observed large-scale structures. Traditional approaches to studies of structure formation in the presence of dark energy or a modified gravity implement the Press & Schechter formalism. I explore the potential for universality in the Press & Schechter formalism and what dark matter haloes may be able to tell us about cosmology.

The discovery of cosmic acceleration has prompted the need for a new understanding of cosmology. The presence of this acceleration is often described as the dark energy problem or the Lambda problem.The simplest explanation is that the acceleration is due to addition of a cosmological constant to Einstein's equation, but this resolution is unsatisfactory as it leaves several unanswered questions. Although General Relativity has been tested in the strong-field limit, the apparent dark energy may be urging us to consider experimental cosmology as such a test for large scales. In this vein, I have pursued a study of modifications to Einstein's gravity as well as possible related quantum gravity phenomenology. Not only must the details of modified gravities be worked out, but their impact on other astrophysics must be checked. For example, structure formation provides a strong test of any cosmic acceleration model because a successful dark energy model must not inhibit the development of observed large-scale structures. Traditional approaches to studies of structure formation in the presence of dark energy or a modified gravity implement the Press & Schechter formalism. I explore the potential for universality in the Press & Schechter formalism and what dark matter haloes may be able to tell us about cosmology.

The presence of massive objects is detectable in observations via the gravitational lensing effect on light from more distant sources. From this effect it is possible to reconstruct the masses of clusters, and the distribution of matter within the cluster. However, further theoretical work needs to be done to properly contextualize any proposed projects involving, for instance, SALT data sets. Observational lensing studies use one of two techniques to recover the lens mass distribution: parametric (model dependent) techniques; and, a more recent innovation, non-parametric methods. The latter deserves further study as a tool for cluster surveys. To this end, we provide a comprehensive analysis of existing non-parametric algorithms and software, as well as estimates on the likely errors to be expected when used as an astronomical tool. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2009.

We have simulated structure formation on cosmological-scales using N-body simulations run on the University of KwaZulu-Natal's cluster of computers and have used these simulations to investigate aspects of galaxy evolution. In particular, we focus on the rotation of dark matter halos identified in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) simulations. These halos are typical of those thought to surround galaxies. Understanding their morphology and kinematics will help with the interpretation of observations and will constrain models of galaxy formation and evolution. We have determined the mass function of our simulated halos and shown that this agrees well with other simulations and theoretical predictions of this function. We have also explored the evolution of the mass function with redshift, which clearly shows hierarchical structure formation. In considering the angular momentum of our sample of halos, we have found the spin distribution to be well fit by a log normal distribution. After removing all halos that have either recently undergone major mergers or contain a significant amount of substructure from our sample, 75% of the remaining halos were found to undergo coherent rotation over periods of three gigayears. The pattern speeds were found to follow a log normal distribution, with an average value of 0.13h radians per gigayear. The most rapidly rotating halo detected was found to have a pattern speed of 0.41h radians per gigayear. Many halos showed alignment between their rotation and minor axes. We found no correlation between halo properties, such as total mass, and the pattern speed. While the speeds observed were not sufficient to cause spiral structure, the rotation could be relevant for understanding other observations of galaxies. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2005