Francisco-Shu Kitaura

 

 

My major research interests are currently in cosmology, in particular in studying the distribution of matter and its luminous tracers in the Universe. The cosmic origin and evolution is encoded in the Cosmological Large–Scale Structure.

 

  An accurate map of the cosmic matter distribution is valuable for a manifold of scientific applications. These vary from galaxy cluster identification, over the construction of signal template filters for weak signal detections, to measurements of Cosmological parameters. Moreover, one can gain insight of the structure formation history when such a map covers a wide range of redshifts. A great effort is done in the astrophysics community to map the Universe creating huge galaxy spectroscopic and photometric redshift surveys and scanning the intergalactic medium with the Lyα forest or with the upcoming 21 cm tomography. This avalanche of data will permit us to construct a three dimensional picture of the distribution of matter in the Universe with unprecedented accuracy.

 

  However, all these observations are plagued by many uncertainties. Some have a physical foundation, others are due to the observation process. The problem of reconstructing the underlying density field, which permits us to make Cosmological studies is in general degenerate. Precise statistical techniques and modelling of the observations and its underlying physics are thus required to extract any valuable Cosmological information.

 

  I focus my work on developing and applying statistical data analysis techniques to infer the matter field and other related quantities like the power–spectrum, the gravitational potential or the peculiar velocity field from sparse incomplete observations. There is a large number of applications in the analysis of the Large–Scale Structure that can be done based on these methods.

 

  The main topics I have worked on are studying the Local Universe, the cosmic web, the dependence of galaxies on their environment, the Inter-galactic Medium, the missing baryon problem, the CMB-dipole, the baryon acoustic oscillations, secondary anistropies in the CMB, perturbation theory for structure formation, mock galaxy catalogues, etc. 

 

  The three major codes I have developed are Argo, Patchy, and Kigen, but I have co-developed many others.

  

 

  I intend to further extend and improve my techniques to Large–Scale Structure analysis and contribute to the understanding of structure formation in the Universe.

 

 

A summary of part of my work describing my three major codes can be found in the following posters: