Searching for Signals of Cosmic Anisotropy

Project Title: Searching for Signals of Cosmic Anisotropy
Program:
CAREERS (323)

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Status: Finishing Up
Project Leader
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Project Leader:
Michael Seifert

Email: mseifer1@conncoll.edu
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Project Personnel
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Mentor(s):
Thomas Langford (510)

Student-facilitator(s):
Wyatt Carbonell (5378), Azade Modaressi (5511)

Mentee(s):
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Project Information
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Project Description:
In recent years, many physicists have begun to investigate the role of Lorentz symmetry in
physics and whether it could be broken. One mechanism by which this could be broken is with
a spacetime vector field; but the energy and pressure of this field would likely result in a slight
anisotropic expansion of the Universe, which could be observable through statistical analysis of
cosmological signals such as supernova data. However, allowing for this anisotropy also
increases the dimension of the parameter space involved.
In 2019, two students performed an initial analysis and found some intriguing results. Their
code involved running an MCMC code in Mathematica to sample a restricted parameter
subspace, and find the most likely values of various cosmological parameters in this restricted
space. Complicating matters, the objective function being optimized in this analysis was itself a
non-linear function of the parameters, and required the solution of numerical integrals at each
step.
I would like to extend this initial analysis to the full parameter space. This will require
optimization of code and porting to a language with less computational “overhead” (probably
Python, but other options might be viable as well.)

Project Information Subsection
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Project Deliverables:
The main deliverable for this project will be a computer code capable of performing MCMC
analysis for this problem on a larger parameter space, and which could be deployed on an HPC
cluster.

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Student Research Computing Facilitator Profile:
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Project Institution: Connecticut College
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Anchor Institution: CR-Yale
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Start as soon as possible.: Yes
Project Urgency: Already behind3Start date is flexible
Expected Project Duration (in months): 3
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Project Milestones:
- Milestone Title: Milestone #1
  Milestone Description: Students are familiar with existing code base and with the physical
  problem being solved. Language for new code base has been chosen. (3 weeks after start)
- Milestone Title: Milestone #2
  Milestone Description: New code has been developed to efficiently calculate
  luminosity-redshift relationship as function of cosmological parameters. (6 weeks after start)
- Milestone Title: Milestone #3
  Milestone Description: New MCMC routines have been developed and are running
  efficiently. (8 weeks after start)
- Milestone Title: Milestone #4
  Milestone Description: Code has been optimized and configured for possible deployment
  on HPC cluster. (12 weeks after start)

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What will the student learn?:
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HPC resources needed to complete this project?:
Ultimately this code would be deployed & run on an HPC cluster. Unfortunately, my institution
does not have such a facility. If time allows, this could be done as part of the 12-week
CAREERS project. If not, it may be possible to get internal funding from my institution and
apply for time via ACCESS or other programs.
[Note: They can use one of Yale's HPCs]

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Final Report
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What is the impact on the development of the principal discipline(s) of the project?:
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Lessons Learned:
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Overall results:
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