Cosmology with Quasars in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres

• Grant number: 24/07281-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: April 24, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Astronomy - Extragalactic Astrophysics
• Principal Investigator: Luis Raul Weber Abramo
• Grantee: Lilianne Mariko Izuti Nakazono
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project is focused on the construction and scientific exploitation of the upcoming J-PAS+WEAVE-QSO quasar survey, as well as the search for very high-redshift quasars using narrow-band filters.The candidate, Ms. Nakazono, will bring her experience in ML techniques, developed in the context of the S-PLUS survey, contributing to improve and extend Machine Learning techniques for quasar classification with a combination of narrow-band and broad-band filters, as well as near-infrared data.She will also develop new tools to search for very high-redshift ($z>4$) quasars in J-PAS and in S-PLUS.Regarding the cosmological exploitation of the resulting quasar survey spanning North and South, which is the main focus of this project, the candidate will employ different methods (such as correlation functions) to identify the main systematics affecting the quasar counts.She will work closely with our team to help construct the mock catalogs of quasars and other tracers, which are central to the covariance matrices, and therefore key to the future exploration of parameter space with Markov Chain Monte Carlo.Finally, the candidate will compute the clustering statistics (e.g., power spectrum or angular power spectrum) for the quasar survey, including the cross-correlation with other tracers of large-scale structure, leading to the testing of cosmological theories, including constraints on cosmological parameters.