10–13 Jun 2025
École de physique, Quai Ernest-Ansermet 24, 1205 Genève, Svizzera
Europe/Zurich timezone

Anchors no more: using peculiar velocities to constrain H0 and the primordial Universe without calibrators

Not scheduled
20m
Main auditorium (École de physique, Quai Ernest-Ansermet 24, 1205 Genève, Svizzera)

Main auditorium

École de physique, Quai Ernest-Ansermet 24, 1205 Genève, Svizzera

talk Tensions Tensions

Speaker

Francesco Sorrenti (University of Geneva)

Description

We develop a novel approach to constrain the Hubble parameter H0 and the primordial power spectrum amplitude As using supernovae type Ia (SNIa) data. By considering SNIa as tracers of the peculiar velocity field, we can model their distance and their covariance as a function of cosmological parameters without the need of calibrators like Cepheids; this yields a new independent probe of the large-scale structure based on SNIa data without distance anchors. Crucially, we implement a differentiable pipeline in JAX, including efficient emulators and affine sampling, reducing inference time from years to hours on a single GPU. We first validate our method on mock datasets, demonstrating that we can constrain H0 and As within ∼10% using ∼1000 SNIa. We then test our pipeline with SNIa from an N-body simulation, obtaining 7%-level unbiased constraints on H0 with a moderate noise level. We finally apply our method to Pantheon+ data, constraining H0 at the 10% level without Cepheids when fixing As to its Planck value. On the other hand, we obtain 15%-level constraints on As in agreement with Planck when including Cepheids in the analysis. Upcoming observations of low redshift SNIa from the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Vera Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time will allow us to fully exploit the potential of our method.

Primary authors

Davide Piras (University of Geneva) Francesco Sorrenti (University of Geneva)

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