English

Cosmology with Galaxy Cluster Phase Spaces

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-08-09 v2

Abstract

We present a novel approach to constrain accelerating cosmologies with galaxy cluster phase spaces. With the Fisher matrix formalism we forecast constraints on the cosmological parameters that describe the cosmological expansion history. We find that our probe has the potential of providing constraints comparable to, or even stronger than, those from other cosmological probes. More specifically, with 1000 (100) clusters uniformly distributed in the redshift range 0z0.8 0 \leq z \leq 0.8, after applying a conservative 80%80\% mass scatter prior on each cluster and marginalizing over all other parameters, we forecast 1σ1\sigma constraints on the dark energy equation of state ww and matter density parameter ΩM\Omega_M of σw=0.138(0.431)\sigma_w = 0.138 (0.431) and σΩM=0.007(0.025)\sigma_{\Omega_M} = 0.007 (0.025) in a flat universe. Assuming 40\% mass scatter and adding a prior on the Hubble constant we can achieve a constraint on the CPL parametrization of the dark energy equation of state parameters w0w_0 and waw_a with 100 clusters in the same redshift range: σw0=0.191\sigma_{w_0} = 0.191 and σwa=2.712\sigma_{w_a} = 2.712. Dropping the assumption of flatness and assuming w=1w=-1 we also attain competitive constraints on the matter and dark energy density parameters: σΩM=0.101\sigma_{\Omega_M} = 0.101 and σΩΛ=0.197\sigma_{\Omega_{\Lambda}} = 0.197 for 100 clusters uniformly distributed in the range 0z0.8 0 \leq z \leq 0.8 after applying a prior on the Hubble constant. We also discuss various observational strategies for tightening constraints in both the near and far future.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.06886,
  title  = {Cosmology with Galaxy Cluster Phase Spaces},
  author = {Alejo Stark and Christopher J. Miller and Dragan Huterer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.06886},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

20 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in PRD. In v2 we now take into account the cosmological dependence on the radial distance scale -- which breaks the degeneracy in the w0-wa parameter space; we also now take into account the mass-cosmological covariance in our prior matrix. For our Fisher matrix code, see https://github.com/alejostark/phase_space_cosmo_fisher

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:59:29.493Z