Workshop on Geometrical and Topological Methods for Cosmological Data Analysis

GOAL OF THE SCHOOL AND WORKSHOP

The measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies have led to the establishment of a standard ΛCDM cosmological model of the Universe. The CMB temperature and polarization measurements have improved significantly with most sensitive experiments, e.g, Planck satellite's 28-month and WMAP satellite's 9-year full-sky observations, the arcminute resolution maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope. Last year, Indian Cosmology Consortium (CMB-Bharat) proposed a space-based CMB mission called Exploring Cosmic History and Origins (ECHO) in response to the 'Announcement of Opportunity (AO) for future Astronomy mission' by ISRO. ECHO will map the sky temperature, linear polarization, and the spectrum of the CMB over the frequency range 60 − 900 GHz with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The main science goals of the ECHO mission is to discover the primordial gravitational waves, map the dark matter distribution over the sky, constraint the reionization history of the Universe, measure the spectral distortions of CMB, and constraint the neutrino mass along with complementary foreground science goals.

In this workshop, we plan to bring together the expertise in the field of CMB around the country to discuss modern geometrical and topological methods for cosmological data analysis. This workshop will train and expose young researchers working in the field of Cosmology so that they can contribute to the rich and growing discipline of cosmological data analysis.

The topics of discussion are:

• Scalar and Tensor Minkowski Functionals
• Planck Sky Model
• Component separation techniques
• Dust foreground simulations
• Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo techniques
• N-body simulations