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The goal of the Pangloss project is to understand, model and account for the mass structure along the line of sight to various interesting objects in the Universe, whose apparent position, brightness and shape are all affected by the combined gravitational lensing effect of all that mass between them and us. In particular, we want to make accurate measurements of distances (cosmography) and high redshift luminosity functions, both of which count line of sight structure as one of their most serious systematic errors.
Pangloss is scientific code still under development. If you do want to see what we are doing, and play around with the code, you should contact Phil to to let us know you are here, and then see the README for more advice.
The documentation of the code is in-place, but hopefully this page will help you navigate it.
"Reconstructing Every Galaxy - Is It Worth It, for Lens Cosmography?" Collett, Marshall et al
This project grew in to our first paper, "Reconstructing the lensing mass in the universe from photometric catalogue data", Collett et al (2013).
"Inferring the Mass Map of the Observable Universe from 10 Billion Galaxies" Marshall, Wechsler, Becker, Collett et al
This is the big one: calibrating to weak lensing data, rather than simulations. One issue is the huge dimensionality integral involved when inferring the hyperparameters of the halo-based model; another is the need to include group and cluster mass distributions. This was the subject of a 2014 Stanford Data Science Initiative proposal, PI'd by Wechsler - dive in to read what we wrote.
"Application to the COSMOGRAIL Lens Sample" Collett, Marshall, Suyu, et al (H0LiCoW)
We'll need some way of estimating the systematics introduced by the calibration step...
"Including Groups and Clusters - Can we avoid the calibration step?" Marshall and anyone else
Should be a straightforward extension to include a suitable group catalog. It is to be seen how good such catalogs are though. Can we include voids? Work with the simulations in 3D? This project might get absorbed into the giant hierarchical inference one listed above.
- Improve ray-tracing scheme beyond the current simple summation of lens planes. Keeton et al weights? Blandford propagation matrices? These will need testing, with suitable simulations...
- Keep track of shear as well as convergence: this is something the lens model can help constrain, after all. Shear calculation is already included - it's just not yet used in the calibration step (since everything goes through kappah_median).
- Include groups and clusters: optical cluster finders exist, and the latest ones even attempt a probabilistic assessment of cluster membership. The outputs from these codes will fit very nicely into our probabilistic framework.
- Move to 3D modeling of the smooth component: We tried to make this work, but couldn't quite. It deserves a bit mores tudy...
- Include voids, filaments and sub-galactic halos. This is probably three upgrades - but since we don't know which is most important yet, it seems sensible to keep these together...
- Fit to weak lensing data: thus freeing ourselves from the simulations (except via the hyper-priors, a safer place to make assumptions).