Scientific Seminars

CosmoMC course - part 1

Jason Dossett
INAF-OAB

2016-09-19    14-17    Merate - Library

With the wealth of available cosmological observables, we have entered into an era of precision cosmology. By combining multiple cosmological probes we are able to place tight constraints on our cosmological parameters. In order to fit theory to observation and constrain our cosmological parameters quickly we take advantage of modern computing and write programs to do this. One of the state of the art programs to do this is CosmoMC (Cosmological Monte Carlo). This program consists of two parts CAMB (Code for Anisotropies in the Microwave Background), which calculates the CMB anisotropies, the matter power spectrum, as well as the expansion history for a given set of cosmological parameters; and CosmoMC itself which is a sampling program that uses an MCMC sampling algorithm to explore the cosmological parameter space and computes the likelihoods for various cosmological observables.