Optimal Transport Reconstruction of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations.

A weighted, semidiscrete, fast optimal transport (OT) algorithm for reconstructing the Lagrangian positions of protohalos from their evolved Eulerian positions is presented. The algorithm makes use of a mass estimate of the biased tracers and of the distribution of the remaining mass (the "dust") but is robust to errors in the mass estimates. Tests with state-of-art cosmological simulations show that if the dust is assumed to have a uniform spatial distribution, then the shape of the OT-reconstructed pair correlation function of the tracers is very close to linear theory, enabling subpercent precision in the baryon acoustic oscillation distance scale that depends weakly, if at all, on a cosmological model. With a more sophisticated model for the dust, OT returns an estimate of the displacement field which yields superb reconstruction of the protohalo positions and, hence, of the shape and amplitude of the initial pair correlation function of the tracers. This enables direct and independent determinations of the bias factor b and the smearing scale Σ, potentially providing new methods for breaking the degeneracy between b and σ_{8}.

Exact enumeration approach to first-passage time distribution of non-Markov random walks.

We propose an analytical approach to study non-Markov random walks by employing an exact enumeration method. Using the method, we derive an exact expansion for the first-passage time (FPT) distribution of any continuous differentiable non-Markov random walk with Gaussian or non-Gaussian multivariate distribution. As an example, we study the FPT distribution of the fractional Brownian motion with a Hurst exponent H∈(1/2,1) that describes numerous non-Markov stochastic phenomena in physics, biology, and geology and for which the limit H=1/2 represents a Markov process.

Galaxy Correlation Functions Provide a More Robust Cosmological Standard Ruler.

We show how a characteristic length scale imprinted in the galaxy two-point correlation function, dubbed the "linear point," can serve as a comoving cosmological standard ruler. In contrast to the baryon acoustic oscillation peak location, this scale is constant in redshift and is unaffected by nonlinear effects to within 0.5 percent precision. We measure the location of the linear point in the galaxy correlation function of the LOWZ and CMASS samples from the Twelfth Data Release (DR12) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Collaboration. We combine our linear-point measurement with cosmic-microwave-background constraints from the Planck satellite to estimate the isotropic-volume distance D_{V}(z), without relying on a model-template or "reconstruction" method. We find D_{V}(0.32)=1264±28 Mpc and D_{V}(0.57)=2056±22 Mpc, respectively, consistent with the quoted values from the BOSS Collaboration. This remarkable result suggests that all the distance information contained in the baryon acoustic oscillations can be conveniently compressed into the single length associated with the linear point.