Max Tegmark's library: complementarity

Figure 2: The 68% confidence regions from three hypothetical SN Ia data sets that might be available in five years time, together with those from MAP and Planck with and without polarization.

Please click here to get the 440K postscript file with the paper. To download a color postscript file with any of the two figures shown, just click on it. Click here if you are interested in other research of mine.


Cosmic complementarity 1: 
probing the acceleration of the Universe

Authors:

Max Tegmark, Daniel EisensteinWayne Hu & Richard Kron

Abstract:

We assess the accuracy with which Omega and Lambda can be measured by combining various types of upcoming experiments. Useful expressions for the Fisher information matrix are derived for classical cosmological tests involving luminosity (eg, SN Ia), angular size, age and number counts. These geometric probes are found to be quite complementary both to each other and to inferences from cluster abundance and the cosmic microwave background (CMB). For instance, a joint analysis of SN Ia and CMB reduces the error bars by about an order of magnitude compared to a separate analysis of either data set.

Reference info:

astro-ph/9805117, submitted to ApJL
Figure 3: Degeneracy curves - they connect models that can't be distinguished by various cosmological tests.

Cosmic complementarity 2: 
combining CMB and supernova observations

Authors:

Max Tegmark, Daniel Eisenstein & Wayne Hu

Abstract:

We compute the accuracy with which Omega and Lambda can be measured by combining future SN Ia and CMB experiments, deriving a handy expression for the SN Ia Fisher information matrix. The two data sets are found to be highly complementary: a joint analysis reduces the error bars by more than an order of magnitude compared to a separate analysis of either data set.

Reference info:

astro-ph/9804168, to appear in "Fundamental parameters in Cosmology", 1998 Rencontres de Moriond

Comment:

This precedes the first paper, and is essentially a subset thereof. Download it by clicking here. For those of you who can't imagine living with Lambda,  it contains results for a different fiducial cosmology: vanilla CDM. The supernova treatment is also somewhat more explicit than in the first paper.

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This page was last modified July 1, 1998.
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