Summer 2003

There will be a mini-course on large-scale structure, held in the Astronomy department (Rm 544) July 7-11, in the afternoons from 2-4:30 pm. The purpose of this course is to review foundational material in the subject of large-scale structure and to cover more advanced topics not regularly covered in the currently offered courses.

The course will run as follows: certain more specialized topics will be covered by faculty or postdocs with particular expertise in the topic. More basic, "general-knowledge" sorts of topics will be covered by students in the course who volunteer to read up on the subject and prepare a lecture. In general, all students will be assigned some reading on the subject; the presenter will read a bit more widely and present the material in class. Hopefully the class will be small enough that the format can be more discussion-style than lecture-style.

Course outline

Monday

Things you do with redshift surveys: a journal club on recent LSS papers

• Cosmological results from the 2dF galaxy redshift survey by Matthew Colless.
• The XMM-LSS survey article on scientific motivations and first observations
• The K.A.O.S. project. See chapter 2 of the "purple book".

Tuesday

Luminosity functions.
Darren Madgwick
Notes:

• Lecture notes (PDF file)

Tuesday

Theoretical basics: the power spectrum, transfer functions and the growth of perturbations; relations to background cosmology. Overview of methods for measuring the power spectrum; current constraints.
Brian Gerke
Reading:

• Brian's lecture notes
• M. Bartelmann's conference proceedings
• W. Hu's lecture notes on large-scale structure

Wednesday

From continuous fields to point processes: the Poisson model and optimal sampling.
Michael Boylan-Kolchin
Notes:

• Marc Davis' lecture notes (PS file)
• Martin White's (scanned) lecture notes (PDF file)

Wednesday

Cosmology from the abundance of objects: the Press-Schechter formalism (and extentions, e.g., Sheth & Tormen).
Jared Mehl
Notes:

• Lecture notes

Thursday

Computing two-point statistics (correlation function, power spectrum): overview, history, and recent developments.
Joanne Cohn
Reading:

• Measuring the galaxy power spectrum with future redshift surveys
• Notes on power spectrum estimation (PDF file)
• Notes on the correlation function (scanned, PDF file)

Thursday

Redshift space distortions: the Kaiser formula and beyond.
Shwetabh Singh
Reading:

• Scanned notes (PDF file)
• Martin's notes (PDF file)
• A.J.S. Hamilton sections 1, 2, 5 and 6.
• N. Kaiser, MNRAS 227, 1; sections 1, 2 and 3.1
• J. Peacock et al.

Friday

The many meanings of bias.
Martin White
Reading:

• Some notes on halo biasing

Friday

The halo model -- a basic overview.
Renbin Yan
Reading:

• Analytic model for galaxy and dark matter clustering (Seljak)

Friday

Lower-dimensional surveys (weak lensing, SZ).
CANCELLED

Also some notes on higher-order perturbation theory by Jordan Carlson. This PDF has embedded animations which are best viewed using the Adobe reader.

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