STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
Thursday, May 19th, 2011 at 4.10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments: 3.30pm, MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)
Speaker: Ethan Anderes (Dept Statistics, UC Davis)
Title: Weighing the Dark Sky
Abstract: This talk presents a new estimation method for mapping dark matter density from observed CMB intensity and polarization fields. Our method uses Bayesian techniques to estimate the average curvature of the lensing gravitational potential over small local regions. These local curvatures are then used to construct an estimate of a low pass filter of the projected dark matter density. By utilizing Bayesian/likelihood methods one can easily overcome problems with missing and/or non-uniform pixels and problems with partial sky observations (E and B mode mixing, for example). Moreover, our methods are local in nature which allow us to easily model spatially varying beams and are highly parallelizable. We note that our estimates do not rely on the typical Taylor approximation which is used to construct estimates of the gravitational potential by Fourier coupling. This work is based on collaboration with Lloyd Knox (Physics, UC Davis) and Alexander van Engelen (Physics, McGill).
