Public Dissertation Talk by Alina Sabyr, Columbia
In this talk, I will present work on several cosmological and astrophysical probes: weak gravitational lensing (WL), thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (tSZ), and spectral distortions. Each of these signals can provide unique ways to test and reveal different components of the standard cosmological model, and to improve our understanding of the small-scale astrophysical processes. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss extracting non-Gaussian information from WL and tSZ, focusing on modeling challenges for the WL peak counts and the information content of several tSZ summary statistics. In the second part of the talk, I will explore future prospects for spectral distortions. In particular, I will present a new instrument concept to detect the \mu-distortion, a re-analysis of the COBE/FIRAS data to place constraints on the y-distortion, and a new infrared signal — a spectral distortion in the cosmic infrared background.
Note: A zoom link will be circulated by email.
Host/advisors: Zoltan Haiman, Colin Hill