2022-12-02 11:00  Online

Cosmological Parameter Constraints from the Topology of Large Scale Structure

Prof. Stephen Appleby

The distribution of galaxies in the low redshift Universe provides information on the initial conditions,
energy content and evolution of the Universe from its almost Gaussian primordial state to the highly
non-linear cosmic web that we observe today. In this talk I will introduce a class of statistics that are
capable of extracting both Gaussian and non-Gaussian information from the matter distribution. The
so-called Minkowski Functionals and their rank-2 tensorial generalisation are a class of topological
descriptors of a field which can be used to measure cosmological parameters, test the degree of non-
Gaussianity as a function of scale and also provides a mechanism to test statistical isotropy. I will
describe these statistics, explain how we extract them from galaxy catalogs and elucidate what they
can tell us about the properties of the Universe.