Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Constraining Cosmological Parameters Using The Correlation Function, Michael Warrener

Honors Theses

As the European Space Agency prepares to launch the space telescope Euclid in 2020, we are interested in using its observations of galaxy clustering as a new geometry-based tool to constrain the cosmological parameters Ωm and ΩΛ. In this work, we use data simulated by Magneticum (a high-resolution cosmological structure simulation) to model the correlation functions of both galaxies and clusters at several redshifts. We fit analytic models to the simulated data centered at the baryon acoustic oscillation peak to extract both the matter density parameter Ωm and the dark energy density parameter ΩΛ: We find that the correct cosmology …